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Toaru Majutsu No Index New Testament Volume 15
Toaru Majutsu No Index New Testament Volume 15
Rock_on_Right_Arm.[edit]
The meaning of each individual event may not be immediately evident.
But when viewed together, something else entirely comes into view.
——December 3. The High Priest, one of the Magic Gods visiting Academy City,
brought extreme disaster.
What they wanted was incredibly simple.
“We want a way of knowing if we are doing the right thing.”
In exchange for taking on that one role, he would be lent the power of all the Magic Gods
and be tossed into a framework that made him ruler of the world.
“Become our scorer and obtain the altar of the Magic Gods, Kamijou Touma.”
——After Kamijou Touma rejected the High Priest’s wish and fled on a new kind of
bicycle known as an acrobike, Misaka Mikoto joined him and was faced with a concept
that overturned the very core of her being.
“It isn’t working…”
She was one of Academy City’s seven Level 5s. She was the #3 Railgun.
But after utilizing all of that, a certain thought came to her mind.
“I’m only a burden to him!!”
——The High Priest was launched outside the atmosphere using a giant mass driver, but
he fused with the Arrowhead Comet and attempted to return to earth. Then, that Magic
God was intercepted and killed in an unexpected way.
“Sensei, are you ready?”
It was the Anti-Art Attachment.
The golden retriever attached to that large mountain of weaponry spoke with an artificial
voice.
“Yes, you need to stand back a little.”
——Aleister and Kihara Noukan observed Academy City from a different viewpoint and
thus they noticed something.
“One down. No, with Zombie, I suppose it’s two.”
“Well done. That takes care of the Magic Gods.”
“What are you talking about? I only took out the High Priest.”
“Then you didn’t do that?”
——When Kamijou returned to his student dorm disheartened but alive, the next disaster
arrived in the form of a package.
“Wha-!? N-Nephthys!?”
“Kamisato Kakeru has shown up. If he is planning to slaughter all of the Magic Gods,
then wouldn’t Othinus be in trouble too?”
——That same day, two boys ran across each other on the streets at night.
“That’s your business. It has nothing to do with me.”
“True. And that is exactly why I don’t need to worry about you in the slightest.”
——Just before their clash, the colors red and black attacked them simultaneously.
“What is this? …Birdway?”
Kamijou Touma grabbed the one sister from a rotten red carpet.
“Pa…Patri…Patricia Birdway? Is that it?”
Kamisato Kakeru lifted the other sister from a black substance.
——Just as people gathered around Kamijou Touma, plenty of people gathered around
Kamisato Kakeru.
“The setup is complete.”
“Did she really think a hot-blooded boy was going to back off when he heard that?”
“She only draws Kamisato-san in because she isn’t aware what she’s doing.”
——One sister was throwing away her life to save the other, while the other was giving
up on her life to stop the first.
The two boys with supernatural powers in their right hands became involved in that
confrontation.
“Didn’t you find it odd that they’re being so unnaturally nice to us? We’re supposed to be
normal high school boys.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
——Kamijou Touma with Imagine Breaker and Kamisato Kakeru with World Rejecter.
Once the two right fists clashed, a conclusion was certain. One of them would be
declared the winner.
“Imagine Breaker didn’t amount to much.”
In this case, it ended with Kamisato’s victory.
Or it should have.
“Who would have thought there was something else inside Imagine Breaker?”
And…
And…
And…
“Pant, pant…!!”
In the middle of the Academy City night, a boy covered in sweat sat with his back against
a building’s concrete building.
It was Kamijou Touma.
He gasped for breath and held his dangling right arm with his left hand.
Blood was splattered all over the road.
It had only been his own blood at first and it should have remained that way.
He had clashed with Kamisato.
His arm had been torn away by World Rejecter and sent “somewhere else”.
The explosion of intense pain and the almost comical geyser of red blood were still burnt
into the back of his mind.
But…
Even so…
“What…was that?”
Unable to even stand up, he gulped.
Even now, his right arm was attached like normal. He had no noticeable injuries. He
remained so perfectly healthy that one would assume the red stains covering his clothes
came from someone else.
Also, Kamisato Kakeru, the boy he had confronted here, was gone.
“What in the world was that?”
His heart pounded in his ears.
He could not think properly.
Two types of blood were splattered everywhere. One was from the severed arm and the
other was from Kamisato Kakeru who should have had an absolute advantage.
Kamijou could not believe what he had seen with his own eyes.
The confusion inside him would not settle down as he continued staring fearfully toward
his right arm that pulsated from within like a pump.
He had run across unexplainable phenomena a few times in the past.
There was something about his right arm.
He knew that.
But…
(It doesn’t add up.)
At the end of the chaos in the Eastern European Baggage City, his right arm had done
something mysterious. A strange power had erupted from the severed wrist.
But incomplete Magic God Othinus had easily crushed it in her grasp.
If Othinus could defeat it on her own, then it made no sense for it to overwhelm Kamisato
Kakeru who could instantly slaughter the full power Magic Gods. That was like saying
you could not defeat a single gun but that you could defeat an army armed with thousands
or tens of thousands of guns. Of course, there may have been an issue of compatibility
where a simple pyramid structure did not apply, but it still felt wrong.
Regardless, the fact remained that Kamijou Touma had driven off Kamisato Kakeru.
He should not have been able to, but he had done it.
“…”
That bloody back appeared in the back of Kamijou’s mind.
Something higher on the food chain. An unbeatable predator. A supernatural power with
those parameters set in stone.
Kamijou remembered the look in Kamisato’s eyes as the boy glanced back over his
shoulder just before leaving.
The boy had been holding his unnaturally limp right arm and leaving on unsteady feet
without a stable center of gravity.
Confusion.
Hatred.
Fear.
Before, his eyes had contained a lukewarm look directed at the boy he thought was the
same as him, but that had been decisively excised. And Kamijou could understand why.
He could now anyway.
After all…
“What is…this?”
He returned to the very first question.
He had asked this of himself over and over again, but he could not find the answer.
In other words…
“Is this really the same as…that one from before?”
“…”
Her target had white hair and red eyes. One hand held a cane with a modern design and
the other held a plastic bag from a drug store. He reminded Salome of white asparagus.
No one could end up like that without being thrown into a uniquely arranged environment.
“Academy City’s #1. Since you’re famous, you’ve gotta be used to things like this. I’m
here to kill you real quick.”
“…”
“Oh? You’re not onboard with that? Maybe you need some more motivation. Are you
gonna say something like ‘I will never kill again (sparkle☆)’? Heh heh heh. Ah ha ha
ha!! After everything you did, do you really think you can rid yourself of allllll that bad
stuff you did and become a nice clean good person? Hyah hyah hyah hyah hyah!!”
“…”
“And you can’t just rid yourself of killings, don’tcha think?”
The raincoat girl’s smile vanished and an odd emptiness filled her eyes.
“We’re different. Then again, a proper human being might laugh if they heard that since
it’s like a rapist insisting he isn’t as bad as a cannibal. Still, we’re different. If anyone
wanted to put us in the same category, that would be more than enough reason to kill
them, don’tcha think? But even if we’re different, I can still tell. You can’t get rid of your
killing. Not even if we were the only people left in the world and I raised my hands and
said I’d grown out of killing.”
“…”
“How about a little test?”
She laughed.
With the waterproof hood over her head, Salome held out her index finger.
She pointed at Accelerator.
No, at the plastic bag in his hand.
“I can understand the milk and chocolate. The rubber ducky and shampoo hat might just
be your idea of a fun bath time. …But there’s just no way your feet would fit in those tiny
shoes, don’tcha think? In that case, might their owner be somewhere nearb-…”
Before she could finish speaking, Salome’s pointer finger and the arm attached to it were
gone.
He had not done anything special.
He had simply approached her, simply grabbed her arm, and simply torn it off.
The series of actions merely had some vector manipulation involved to provide
superhuman speed.
“Hyah.”
But…
“Hyah hyah hyah hyah!! Oh, wow. I’ve gotta have struck the jackpot here!!”
No pain or fear filled Mass Murderer Salome’s mind.
In fact, she showed the relief and excitement of someone who had finally run across
another eccentric that could discuss an old movie that had long since stopped playing.
She took a step back and the bottom of her double raincoat floated out like a jellyfish or
clione. She bent forward and held her stomach with her remaining arm while not even
trying to hide her continued laughter.
Then she used that remaining hand to grab the toy pocket watch hanging from her neck
and kissed it.
“My External Offering can absorb any weapon or armor that I can destroy barehanded
and build it into my own power. And after that snowball rolls down the hill far enough,
no one can stop the chain, don’tcha think? So that’s the thing. I’m not a good match for
people who don’t rely on civilized tools such as weapons and shields. There isn’t much I
can do when they’re stupider than a chimpanzee and just use their own two arms.”
“You…”
“Spare me any hackneyed lines like ‘What did you do to your body? (sparkle☆)’. Heh
heh. At the very least, it isn’t as strange as that brain of yours.”
There was a sound like the straining of a wet roll of thread.
No blood came from the torn raincoat and severed arm.
It also felt odd.
The surface of her brown suntanned arm was smooth, but it contained the inhuman
eeriness of a mannequin.
“See, what matters for a sacrifice is how important it is to the person offering it. If you
had such a great season that you have way more food than you could ever eat, then rice or
fish isn’t gonna count as a sacrifice. And some stranger you abduct won’t work as a
living sacrifice. Do you know anything about Voodoo rituals? When they sell their soul
to the devil, once a year they have to offer up someone who it pains them to sacrifice: a
family member, a lover, a beloved teacher, etc. But once they run out of people, they’ve
gotta pay with their own life. This is the same. Only the External Offering just wasn’t
quiiiiite enough for peace of mind as a mass murderer. I needed to offer up something
even more precious…and that’s where the Internal Offering comes in. In other words, I
gave my own body to my god.”
A living sacrifice.
The simplest form was to exchange one’s own life for having a wish granted.
But even if she surrendered her own heart, there was a way to survive.
She replaced herself and turned herself into a tool.
Misaka Mikoto should have noticed, but she had been distracted by the initial impact.
The External Offering was a form of the occult that absorbed any weaponry that Salome
destroyed with her own hands. But grabbing and breaking the Iron Sand Sword was
beyond the limits of martial arts. A normal human could never do that.
“This is messed up.”
Accelerator glanced at the torn-off arm, tossed it aside, and spat out his comment.
But he was not interested in her occult explanation or that she had replaced her flesh and
blood body for an artificial one.
“That’s not made in Academy City.”
“Ha ha ha! I guess you would notice. Yeah, I have no connection to this crazy city. So I
had to gather together whatever I could find, open up my own gut, and exchange it all on
my own. And all the while, I sold off each part of my maiden’s body to my god.”
She made it sound simple.
But if it was not made in Academy City, there was little guarantee it would work properly.
If it was handmade, no one else could fix it in an emergency and odds were good it was
not perfectly shielded against germs, chemicals, rust, electromagnetic waves, etc.
Even if you needed it to keep your heart beating, would anyone really use a pacemaker
made using the chip taken from a toy gimmick light or alarm clock sold at a 100 yen
shop?
Yet just such a reckless person stood before him.
For one thing, why was Salome wearing raincoats directly over her naked body?
Was she placing a frosted glass filter over her distorted artificial body to make it look
real? Or had she needed to cover her entire body with thick plastic to keep water and dust
out?
She was partners with death in more ways than one.
Rust or germs could reach her brain at any moment.
She was truly an insane mass murderer.
But her smile remained intact as if she were enjoying this tightrope walk as a form of
entertainment.
“But you’ve gotta be more insane than me. You claim you don’t kill anymore, but you
didn’t hesitate to rip off someone’s arm which has gotta knock people unconscious from
traumatic shock. That’s the same as Mr. Elephant claiming to be friends with the humans
while also throwing rocks at them, don’tcha think?”
“Then would you prefer I gave you a nice pat on the head?”
“With that hand? Don’t joke. Who knows how many times you’d shake up my brain.”
The raincoat girl smiled as she pulled something from her pocket. It was not a pen nor
was it a stick of candy. It was a steel hook and it was probably meant to stab into a
human’s back and lift them up. She spun that cruel execution tool in her fingers like a pen
and then bent it between her fingers.
It looked like some kind of ritual.
It looked like someone lighting their glow stick at a concert.
“But just as my data said, your trigger is the one called Last Order. I’m not trying to
provoke you this time. I’m completely serious. Isn’t it exhausting living like that? No
matter who or what you protect, it won’t wipe your history clean. Hanging around good
people, heroes, and holy women isn’t going to make you any of those things. You’ve
gotta understand that. You think going to a concert makes you one with the idol? You
think wearing a limited edition happi coat and waving fans around links your hearts
together? Did you know the performer can’t even see the audience’s faces in the darkness
created by the bright lights shining on the stage? That’s exactly the position you’re in,
don’tcha think?”
“…I know that.”
“But if you’re happy clinging to the announcement of a new song and going to every last
performance of the national tour, from Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south,
then I won’t stop you.”
“I know that, I know that, I know that, but it still pulls the trigger.”
“How long are you going to be some little kid’s attachment? The title of the strongest is
weeping.”
Something dry burst between the two of them.
Two low voices acted as a signal.
“I’ll kill you.”
“Feeling motivated now?”
Plenty of blades, blunt weapons, and projectiles overflowed from the sports bag.
A clash between two who knew the taste of killing immediately followed.
Part 4[edit]
District 7 had all the basics, making it a convenient district to live in, but that also meant
it was difficult to find any major landmarks. Kamijou and Kamisato wanted to fake a
fight on an online video so Salome would contact them, so they wanted to surreptitiously
slip in something anyone would recognize.
“What should we do? All I know about this place is from the sightseeing pamphlets.”
“That’s right. I guess we should go with the Windowless Building. Some VIP called the
Board Chairman lives there, so it can supposedly survive a nuclear attack just fine. That
should be listed on the guide maps at any train station.”
With that, the two of them changed direction.
But as soon as they did, over one thousand copper coins filled the area above Kamijou
Touma’s head like a meteor storm.
“Eh…?”
At first, he did not know what this meant.
As he stood there dumbly, the downpour of projectiles descended like a suspended
ceiling and quickly reached him. He frantically raised his right hand overhead, but that
was no help. Orange sparks filled the air, a cloud of dust formed as the asphalt was torn
away, and the spiky-haired boy was struck all over and bounced a few times as he rolled
along the road.
“Gwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh
hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!?”
Finding himself on his side, he arched his back and screamed, but he could not get up.
Meanwhile, someone waved down from the roof of a short multi-tenant building.
“Yahoo. Everything going all right, boss?”
The delinquent girl’s long brown hair was cut so that two tufts looked like fox ears. She
held an empty plastic bottle upside down in her hands. When she shook it a little, the
countless ten yen coins wriggled on the road. They slowly gathered together in a
whirlwind shape.
The unharmed boy waved back from the ground.
“Right on schedule, Elza.”
“Heh heh heh. He praised me.”
Intense heat spiraled through Kamijou’s head.
Was this how it would be? Did Kamisato not care about any damage to his side after all?
Would he let Mass Murderer Salome go on her rampage, harm all sorts of people in
Academy City, and leave the people and world Kamijou cared about floating in a pool of
blood? And would he consider that a happy ending as he clapped his hands and smiled at
his new high score?
“Ka…mi…satooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!”
“Pipe down. Sure I betrayed you, but I’m giving you what you want. This is the best way
to stop my sister.”
Kamijou did not understand.
Unless…
“Hey, Kamijou Touma. Do you remember what I told you? Salome is slaughtering your
friends and acquaintances so that my group will win. Then isn’t the solution obvious?
You decided that having Kamijou Touma and Kamisato Kakeru clash in front of the
camera and faking my defeat would send her running to us. But there’s still a risk of
Salome realizing it’s an act, not being fooled, and continuing her killing. Basically, it
leaves the initiative in the hands of that sister that’s known as a mass murderer. That’s a
risk we can’t afford to take. So I like the sound of a simpler and surefire method that
takes the initiative away from her.”
“What…are you…?”
“You just have to die.”
World Rejecter gave the simplest death sentence possible.
“Remember what I said? Salome’s goal is to guide my faction to victory. So we just have
to make sure you, the enemy king, die on camera. Do that, and her reason to fight will
naturally vanish. Then you don’t have to worry about any of your friends dying. And
since it isn’t an act, there’s no risk of Salome not being fooled and remaining out of our
control. Isn’t that just a wonderfully perfect solution?”
“…”
Kamijou could not get up thanks to the previous impact and he could tell his pulse was
racing.
An unpleasant sweat covered his palms.
The disconcerting pulsation from his neck grew louder.
“Elza.”
Kamisato sounded like he was reciting something.
“Fran, Maya, Luca.”
One was a pajama UFO girl with tons of antennae coming from her backpack as she used
a giant balloon to float around. One was a ghost girl dressed in white who floated above
the artificial fog machine at her feet. One was a pirate girl with an eyepatch, pirate hat,
miniskirt, cutlass, and large musket.
“Aileen, Lime, Lisa, Mary, Anna, Iris, Nina, Maive, Elly, Clara, Deborah, May, Sophia,
Siren, Sandy, Marine, Rosary, Scala, Yuny, Lemon, Nikita, Lemy, Machina, Catherine,
Dorothea, Athena, Muse, Berry, Susan, Melon, Milcah, Amy, Linda, Fia, Snow, Laika,
Honey, Eve.”
One was, one was, one was, one was, one was, one was, one was, one was, one was, one
was, one was, one was, one was, one was, one was, one was, one was, one was, one was,
one was, one was, one was, one was, one was, one was…
Kamijou could not even speak as girl after girl appeared from every direction.
He could not move, he was hopelessly outnumbered, and each of them had undergone an
extreme mutation like Claire and Elza. Each and every one of them would have been a
formidable foe on her own, so he felt nothing but despair as they approached in numbers
rivaling the stars in the sky.
“I hate doing this. I was supposed to be handling this, but I really do want their help here.
They’ll just be holding you down while I provide the finishing blow, but just getting
some help is a pretty big problem.”
Kamisato Kakeru pulled out a cheap cellphone.
He pointed the lens at his prey like the master of an insane classroom undergoing a moral
hazard.
And he spoke coldly.
“I’m dirtying my hands by making this unpleasant snuff film for the sake of your friends.
So at least let me finish this quickly, Kamijou Touma-kun.”
“…!!!???”
Part 5[edit]
“Whoops.”
A curious look came over Mass Murderer Salome as she glanced down at her vibrating
smartphone.
What had happened?
The asphalt around her was torn up, the street signs were bent, and flames rose vertically
from an underground gas pipe like a flamethrower.
Someone’s little sister ignored it all as she spoke to herself.
“Now, now. You’re really doing something silly, cursed Onii-chan.”
“Hm? The hell are you talking about?”
Academy City’s #1, Accelerator, gave her a puzzled look from ten meters away. He
frowned at what the raincoat girl said…or rather, at the fact that she was recklessly
looking down at her phone in the middle a fight to the death with the #1.
But Salome only shrugged.
“But depending how this plays out, it could be interesting, don’tcha think?”
She laughed.
“Hey, #1. Let’s call it quits here. I’ll give you a little more time to live as a pitiful little
attachment.”
“Do you really think I give a shit about what you want?”
“Oh, I think you will.”
Salome rolled her head around.
“Kanou Shinka.”
“?”
“Fremea Seivelun, Fräulein Kreutune, Kuroyoru Umidori, Misaka Worst, and Last Order.
Such naughty children, not going to school. And if the unfortunate befalls a naughty child,
that’s gotta count as divine punishment, right?”
“…”
“Yes, you can’t possibly know where all of them are, can you? And there are plenty more
on my list, maybe even some in that crowd over there. I’m fine with continuing here and
I doubt you’ve got anything to be afraid of with your reflection. …But will every single
projectile you reflect back really end up hitting me? And if they don’t, we’ll have some
stray shots and ricochets flying around, don’tcha think?”
He hesitated for just a moment.
Mass Murderer Salome used that opening to leap backwards. Her double raincoats
fluttered like a dancer’s veil. In an act impossible for a flesh and blood body, she jumped
onto the sign sticking out from a building wall, jumped up onto the rooftop, and began
travelling quickly from building to building.
A chill stabbed into her back almost immediately.
She did not even need to turn back to check.
“Here he comes, here he comes. I guess this isn’t someone you can lose on handmade
legs.”
The raincoat girl laughed as she continued her jump of death from rooftop to rooftop.
“But that’s perfect.”
Part 6[edit]
The situation was immediately set into motion.
A raincoat girl suddenly appeared and kicked away the pirate girl approaching Kamijou.
There was nothing she could do.
The bottom of the double raincoat fluttered so calmly it looked out of place.
The circle of girls crumbled all at once. Kamijou Touma was unable to get up, but the
mass murderer girl crouched down nearby and lifted him up onto her shoulder like he
was a bag of rice. She then looked around at the surrounding girls and laughed at the top
of her lungs.
“Hah hah hah!! How are you doing, Onii-chan?”
Her focus shifted to the toy pocket watch hanging from her neck, but then she clicked her
tongue a little.
“Oh, honestly. I had one arm blown off and the other one’s full… I can’t do my good
luck charm like this.”
“What is the meaning of this, Salome?”
Kamisato Kakeru narrowed his eyes a little.
The naked raincoat sister looked at her dangerous brother and laughed.
“You know perfectly well everything I do is consistent, Onii-chan. Crazy people aren’t
crazy because their actions don’t follow any rules. They’re crazy because they never
break a set of rules that only they can understand.”
“…”
“I’ll do anything if it helps you. And that includes murder.”
Salome still held Kamijou who was utterly confused.
“But to put it another way, I’ll never kill if it won’t help you. I mean, what did Kamijou
Touma ever do to Kamisato Kakeru? Is he your enemy for protecting the Magic Gods?
Attacking people in a mistaken outburst of anger is just wrong. And it’s not like you have
any proof that slaughtering all the Magic Gods will erase World Rejecter and return all
those idiots around you to normal. That’s why I’ve gotta go for a more certain method.
Killing Kamijou Touma and slaughtering the Magic Gods won’t necessarily return you to
normal. So who can I kill to return Kamisato Kakeru to normal? There’s just one
absolutely certain answer there, Onii-chan.”
“You can’t mean…”
The sister smiled evilly at her brother’s words.
“I’ll kill every last one of those girls surrounding you. That’s gotta be the correct choice,
don’tcha think?”
Time froze.
Space solidified.
“It wasn’t Kamijou Touma or the Magic Gods that messed up Kamisato Kakeru.
Hamazura, Misaka, and the #1. Also an Academy City airport and bank, I guess. I tried a
few different people, but none of them felt right! I mean, the Kamijou Faction has done
nothing wrong!! The source of it all is that goddamn stupid harem you call the Kamisato
Faction. These idiots are in heat year-round and have even thrown out the term ‘self-
responsibility’. And the only reason you wield that inexplicable right hand called World
Rejecter and get into these pointless fights is to turn them back into complete strangers,
don’tcha think? You’re not Zeus and Hera. Have you ever thought about the commoners
who get caught in the middle of your ridiculous farce?”
“Stop it…”
“See? The source of it all has gotta be pretty clear now, right? Besides, even if the
victims belong to a crazy category like ‘Magic Gods’, the kind of normal high school boy
you can find anywhere shouldn’t be dirtying his hands with killing, don’tcha think? And
a snuff film to save everyone? Don’t make me laugh, Onii-chan. What the hell is this
disturbing orgy of violence with no guilt whatsoever? You’re not a mass murderer. It
might look like you’re standing at the top, but you’re really letting all those crazy people
push you forward. What’s this Kamisato Harem nonsense? Those girls are pretending to
serve you while they’re really possessing you. They’re holding the strings to the foolish
emperor decked out in his ‘new clothes’ and they can move his arms and legs exactly
how they-…”
“Stop it.”
“Not gonna.”
The raincoat girl stuck out her tongue.
“Did you think you could hold back a mass murderer or two by force if you had the
whole laughable Kamisato Faction together? Well, I’m sorry to say you chose the wrong
opponent here. And doing it on camera was basically suicide.”
“?”
“Silly Onii-chan. Didn’t you know Kamijou Touma has a really, really pain in the ass
fan?”
A moment later, a white tornado fell right in the middle of the circle formed by the
Kamisato Faction.
Academy City’s #1 had arrived.
There was no need to watch it all play out.
Salome laughed as she left with Kamijou Touma over the shoulder of her one remaining
arm.
“Ah ha ha ha!! Hah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Oh,
that worked almost too well! My sides hurt!! I can’t stop crying. The dams of tear ducts
across the nation have burst! My sides… Heh heh. Oh, I can’t stand it. Nooo☆ This is
gonna destroy my sides!!”
“Salome…!!”
“Hee hee. The role of strategist doesn’t suit you. If you’re gonna play the normal high
school boy, then it’s gotta suit you better to go with adlibs and grinding your teeth in
anger afterwards. Now farewell, Onii-chan. Adieu. Peh heh heh. Bwa ha ha ha ha ha!!”
Kamisato Kakeru tried running after her, but he was swallowed up by the white storm.
Meanwhile, Kamijou Touma was about as confused as could be.
“Wait a minute! Please explain…well, all of this! Why are you naked? Why do you only
have one arm? You aren’t bleeding. And since you’re acting like his sister, does that
mean you’re Salome? What is all this about you being a mass murderer? And why are
you naked!?”
“You ask about the nudity twice? Does that bother you the most, Adolescent-chan? But
this is my battle body, so I omitted the organs needed for that kind of thing.”
The raincoat girl sounded annoyed as she jumped up to the roof of a three or four story
building.
“Don’t let this sibling fight fool you. I’ll always be my brother’s ally. I’m not like those
dubious hangers-on of his, so I’m not about to fall in love with someone after running
into them when turning a corner. My chastity is more important than the entire planet, so
make no mistake there.”
“…”
“You’ve been running around with my brother, so you’ve gotta understand what I’ve
been doing. I was poking at the Kamijou Faction to throw them into disarray. Once they
know simply being an acquaintance of yours gets them attacked, the foundation
supporting you would crumble. So really, it didn’t matter whether I actually killed them
or not. In fact, slaughtering every last one wouldn’t spread fear quite as efficiently, so I
needed to spare someone who could get the word out. It’s a lot like a riot started by a
baseless rumor, don’tcha think? Just like with zombie computers or roach-killing bait, it
has to be taken back to the inner network to infect all of them. My goal was to create
people who would spread fear like that.”
“I don’t know all the details, but that still means you’re my enemy and the one attacking
my friends, doesn’t it? Then why would you save me!? No, wait. Are you really saving
me? You aren’t just taking me back to your lair, are you!?”
“Not to worry. If I was gonna kill you, I already would have.”
Salome jumped from building to building.
“I truly am crazy. I was a mass murderer before my brother ended up ‘like that’. It was
only recently that I threw away my body with my Internal Offering, but that isn’t the
point. At the core, I’ve been a monster for much longer.”
“…?”
“But regardless, a crazy person will end up thinking crazy things. Namely, that I want to
help my one and only brother who’s been messed up by the Magic Gods or whatever.
And I don’t think those lukewarm horny girls surrounding him are the way to do that.
What I need is you, since you’re boiling at precisely 100 degrees. If you can blow away
that goddamn stupid harem boy, he’s gotta return to normal, right? It’s because those
sluts who can only say ‘yes’ and ‘of course’ are pampering him that he’s got a screw
loose while pretending he’s still sane, don’tcha think? And you’ve got the perfect fist for
this. …That thing’s supposed to destroy illusions, right? That giant moron is high on
himself and his embarrassingly shallow ‘ultimate harem’ of his, so give him a nice
painful taste of reality.”
“Please spare me… With the slaughter of the Magic Gods, the secrets of the world, and
the mystery of my right hand, I’m overwhelmed by so many questions as I approach
some kind of turning point in my life, so do you really have to open the lid and shove me
in between a crazy brother and sister too!?”
“Hah hah! That’s generally what happens when you run across a crazy person, don’tcha
think? They say it’s just a stroke of bad luck, don’t they!?”
Kamijou seriously wanted to go to bed and refuse to deal with any of this, but that was
not an option here.
No matter their reasons for using it, that power was real.
They were still a threat.
He thought about the idea of a normal high school boy once more. Anyone would be
afraid if someone like that had the power to change the world. They would chaotically
and recklessly wield that power. They would be no different from a natural disaster.
“Who is…?”
“Hm?”
“Who is Kamisato Kakeru to you?”
Kamijou Touma sounded almost casual as he asked the question from her shoulder.
The effect was (for some reason) instantaneous.
“Bfh!?”
Raincoat Mass Murderer Salome spat out the contents of her mouth while jumping
between buildings and she lost balance in midair. She somehow managed to avoid falling
to the surface, but she did face plant on a square rooftop. She naturally let go of Kamijou
while rolling around.
The plastic hood of her raincoat fell away from her head and she shouted at him with the
tip of her nose red.
“Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-why would you ask that so bluntly!? You’ve gotta be stupid! I’m his
sister! Not blood related, but his sister! How can you look me in the eye and say that!? Is
this a hill in the setting sun? Just how difficult an adolescent life have you had!?”
“B-before that, can I have time to writhe around in pain too?”
Kamijou was covered in scrapes, but he finally managed to get up.
“Oh, I thought you had your hair wrapped around on the sides, but those were twintails?”
“Eh? Y-yes. Dammit. Did they come undone from the impact?”
“You’re actually pretty cute with that off your head.”
“You don’t have to point out every little thing! The Kamijou Faction is surprisingly
frightening. You’re not my brother!”
Salome tried to quickly put her hood back up, but the twintails seemed to get in the way.
She must have decided wrapping her hair back up with just the one hand would take too
long because she finally gave up and let go of the hood.
“Don’t tell me…”
“Wh-what is it now?”
“Is that pocket watch hanging from your neck something you’ve always worn since
Kamisato bought it for you when you were little? And do you also have a serious-grade
full-spec nyan-nyan body you polish up every night for your ‘Onii-chan’, you crazy
sister?”
“What is with you!? Honestly!!”
The mass murderer was flailing around now.
She used her one arm to grab the pocket watch and hunkered down as if to protect it from
everything in the world.
“I’m not going to take it, so don’t worry.”
“Th-that isn’t the issue!”
She was still blushing, but she must have been mad that he had taken control of the
conversation and was looking down on her. The (naked) raincoat girl heavily crossed her
legs and intentionally winked.
“You wanted to know what kind of person Kamisato Kakeru is, right? You can ask if you
want, but who knows who’s chasing after us. Do you still have the guts to sit around
chatting?”
“I barely know anything about him, so anything you could tell me would be a plus.”
“Oh, is that so?”
Salome tried to cross her arms but then realized she only had the one.
She sighed before continuing.
“He once prayed for me by folding origami cranes.”
“?”
“He taught me how to ride a bike. And how to use chopsticks. Maybe he taught me how
to hold a pencil too, but I forget. We bathed together when we were little. He held my
hand when we went to school. He helped me with my homework and he made sure I had
everything packed before we went on trips. I think he gave me some advice when I got
my first love letter from someone I didn’t particularly like.”
At that point, she grabbed the pocket watch hanging from her neck by a thick thread.
It was a cheap toy mostly made from plastic.
But that meant its manufacturer would no longer be supporting it. If she brought it to a
watch shop, they would just tell her to buy a new one. The fact that it was still running
meant she had treated it with care.
“And as you guessed, he bought this for me. I was always late for everything, so he chose
to forgo some candy and spent his own allowance on it. Funny, isn’t it? There really was
someone who tried to teach a hopeless mass murderer something as simple as how to be
on time.”
Kamijou had wanted an image of the monster known as Kamisato Kakeru.
This answer seemed useless for that, but he was wrong.
“When you get down to it, there’s nothing special about him. You can even say that’s
why I fell for him. Normality can really get to you. Especially for a mass murderer like
me.”
“Could you make this a little simpler?”
“Hmm, I’ll try… For example, greeting the people you meet on the way to school is
normal, right?”
“And?”
“What if that person you met was a bank robber? Would it be normal to smile and greet
them?”
“…”
“That’s what I mean. Normality doesn’t always lead to never-ending and unconditional
compassion and benevolence. I chose the path of a mass murderer, so anything that
happens to me has gotta be my just deserts. But even so, something that isn’t special
really gets to me.”
Kamijou realized Salome had never mentioned anything about Kamisato’s parents.
Nor had Kamisato Kakeru.
That monster had said he started off as the kind of normal high school boy one could find
anywhere. He had said it again and again. That meant he had to have been supported by
the kind of normal mother and father that one could find anywhere, but what had been
their “normal” reaction to Kamisato and Salome?
Had they accepted them?
Or had they not?
“I think they did submit a missing person report. But neither our parents nor the police
seriously tried to find me. After all, I was still showing up at school now and then, even
after running away from home. For the adults, it was best if they were trying to find me
but never actually did. If I was missing and they had no idea what I was doing, then the
parents couldn’t be blamed as the ones holding the reins. And if I was under a different
jurisdiction, the police could escape responsibility for not protecting the peace. They had
no intention of doing a serious investigation and arresting me. But that’s just how society
works when it runs on a demerit system. If the police arrested me alone and discovered
there had been one or two hundred more cases in their jurisdiction, who could say how
many of them would be fired. They were afraid of people asking why they hadn’t noticed
sooner and how they could let themselves be manipulated by a child like that. It had
reached the point where arresting me would actually make things worse for them.”
“Are you serious…? And Kamisato has the nerve to call himself a normal high school
boy?”
“Hah hah! No, a normal family will reject a mass murderer. Of course, with me it was
generally groups. Hence ‘mass’ murderer. I always attacked hopeless cults with end-
times philosophies or divers carrying small plastic packages from the sea at night, so the
higher ups in the police must’ve been in complete chaos. They probably over-
optimistically hoped they could control me and force onto me all the dirty work that the
public security and foreign affairs divisions didn’t want to deal with, don’tcha think? Just
like how a hunter isn’t allowed to shoot someone with their rifle, but they can still press
that gun against someone’s back, guide them into the jungle, and let an un-prosecutable
wild animal chow down on them. …I didn’t really care how I was treated or what my
position was. I mean, I don’t want to attack defenseless commoners. It’s too
boring. When you’ve got a nice shiny rifle in your hands, it’s just rude to turn your back
on the forest and aim for the side of a cow happily eating grass on a farm. That’s animal
abuse and it’s pointless. Hunting isn’t the same as being a predator, don’tcha think? You
aren’t fulfilling your natural role and targeting your prey. It’s the opposite. You’re using
your intelligence and tools to challenge something higher up on the food chain. It’s the
prey overturning the pyramid and killing the predator. That’s why it provides such a
thrilling tension and why the kill has value as a trophy. That’s why hunting is a game that
only humans can play.”
It was a hopeless conversation.
Due to its scale, its presence seemed to overturn good and evil.
No, it had a powerful influence provided by the truth contained within.
“And he was the only one. While everyone else was glancing my way, he looked straight
at me and spoke to me. Although I got sick of him scolding me again and again and again
that killing is wrong.”
Which one of them was normal and average?
Were their parents normal for rejecting a mass murderer? Or was Kamisato average for
facing her nonetheless?
“So I, um, well, pretty seriously look up to my brother. Oh, b-but don’t tell him! If you
do, I really will kill you!!”
“I won’t tell him. And how can you possibly look so friendly? My brain isn’t adding a
filter since you’re a girl, is it?”
“You’ve gotta promise me you won’t… Oh, what am I even saying anymore? But it
would feel wrong to stop after coming this far. Well, anyway, if he was normal, he would
have abandoned a monster like me long ago. He would have run off during the night with
our parents or he would have gotten sick of looking after me and killed me. But he didn’t
do that. Not even I know if I would have been able to stick with him to the end if our
roles were reversed. That’s why I look up to him. …Or I did until that goddamn idiot got
that right hand.”
That right hand.
World Rejecter.
“So do you think the same thing?”
“Hm?”
“Do you think all those people have gathered around him because he has that special
right hand?”
There was definitely something wrong with Salome.
But despite that…no, because of it, the rest of the Kamisato Faction seemed somehow off.
Asking the opinion of a girl known as a mass murderer was ridiculous, but he felt like
there was something there that was only visible to someone like her whose gears were out
of place.
If that mass murderer immediately answered “yes”, even Kamijou would have doubted
himself.
Was that right hand really the whole of it?
Were those girls nothing more than World Rejecter?
Did it have nothing to do with Kamisato Kakeru’s personality?
“What do you think?”
But Salome dodged the issue with a question of her own.
“I do think that right hand, including that aspect, is Kamisato Kakeru’s curse and that’s
why someone needs to destroy it eventually.”
It was not a clear yes or a clear no.
Even that twintails girl who was feared as a mass murderer may have wanted to avoid
saying anything for certain here. Putting it to words might make it a reality, so she was
stopped by an occult chill. Kamijou and Kamisato were enemies, but Salome was
different. She had to stay with him forever, even if certain things proved to be the case.
“I’ve cooled down. Both physically and mentally.” The raincoat girl got to her feet. “We
should probably end this here. Wasting any more time has gotta be dangerous. We can
finish our chat when we reach our destination, Kamijou-chan.”
“Hey, wait! Wah!?”
They did not have time to argue.
Salome immediately grabbed Kamijou and held him rice bag style.
She took another running start and leaped.
She casually hopped from building to building.
“So what are you planning to do about Kamisato Kakeru? In fact, where are we headed!?”
“It doesn’t matter where. It just has to be somewhere with the ‘numbers’ I need to rival
that goddamn stupid harem called the Kamisato Faction.”
“Numbers? Rival?”
“Oh, c’mon. My brother’s used the mysterious powers of his good looks to gather that
suspicious fighting force. Whether they’re gonna attack someone or protect him, they’ve
gotta have all their cards in one place. Otherwise, they’ll all melt away.”
“Please wait a moment. Are you going to get more people involved in this!? In fact, we
need to keep an eye on Kamisato now that he’s making his move! Who knows when he’ll
attack Index and Othinus in my dorm! You’ve gotta be kidding me. If he’s gonna do this,
why can’t he only target me!?”
“You’re dyed pretty deep yourself if you don’t even hesitate to offer yourself up like that.
This isn’t my Internal Offering we’re talking about. But no matter where he starts this,
it’s gotta be best to crush him sooner rather than later. So will you follow my plan for
now?”
Salome sounded exasperated as she jumped from building to building.
Kamijou gradually realized this was the route to school.
“But make no mistake. Offering yourself up won’t save the others. There’s no distinction
between home and away. We’re talking about that brother of mine, so there’s no safe
zone. I wonder just how far the invisible contamination has spread. The setup might
already be complete, so things might be heading to the finale.”
“?”
He did not have time to wait for an answer.
With Kamijou Touma over her shoulder, the raincoat girl took an extra long leap toward
the school building’s roof.
Part 7[edit]
This might be sudden, but I think anyone would be shocked if a mass murderer dropped
down onto the rooftop during lunch.
Especially if she was a girl wearing only raincoats over her dazzling bare skin that had
swimsuit tan lines, if she was acted perfectly fine despite having an arm torn off, and if
she was carrying a teenage boy over one shoulder like a bag of rice.
Thus…
“Hi, coming through. It’s just a suspicious person breaking into your school, so don’t
worry. But stay away, cause I’m pretty dangerous.”
“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!? M-M-Mie-
chaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!!”
The palm-sized student council president known as the Jumpy Bunny was just about to
open her lunchbox, so she hopped straight up while still in her seated position.
The mass murderer naturally did not care and casually tossed Kamijou aside.
The modern girl in a middle school uniform widened her eyes next to the president. Her
lunchbox had an identical design, so it must have been true that Akikawa Mie was
providing food for the Jumpy Bunny. And since they were eating together, this must have
been a “bring-your-lunch day” for the middle school.
“Eh? Eh? Wait…what…?”
“You don’t have to get involved in anything like this, Mie-chan! I-I need to demonstrate
my dignity as the student council president… I-I’ll give you my octopus wiener, so
please spare Mie-chan!!”
“Well, if you’re offering.”
The raincoat mass murderer grabbed the offered item from the upside-down lunchbox lid
and tossed it into her mouth. She showed no interest in the palm-sized president as she
licked her fingertips and toyed with one of her silver twintails that was still exposed. She
seemed unable to relax with them out like that.
However, the gazes of the president and modern middle school girl were painful.
But not for Salome, the one-armed naked raincoat mass murder. It pained Kamijou to be
thought of as “with” her.
“Anyway, I’m going to fix my hair and find anything I can use as a weapon. I used up
everything in my sports bag back with the #1, so I’ve gotta get some material to keep my
chain going.”
“…”
“What’s the matter? Are you worried? I’ll admit it isn’t every day that a dangerous mass
murderer wanders around school searching for knives, but you don’t have to worry this
time. I’m on your side, Kamijou Touma. As long as you’ll continue being a ‘proper
enemy’ for Kamisato Kakeru, that is.”
She stopped speaking there.
But then she glanced over at her torn-off arm as if she had just remembered it.
“No, I guess my arm would come first. I can’t exactly fix my hair without my dominant
arm, can I? There’s gotta be an art room here. Do they have all the standard paste
products like putty and plaster?”
“Your body’s made out of that?”
“No, but I need it to make the model. Then I add in some chemicals. I’m not an electronic
cyborg, so I use chemical reactions instead. I guess I’ll have to start working on a
suspicious recipe in the cooking classroom.”
“Again, your body’s made out of stuff like that!? We’re not talking about a summer
project here!!”
“Honestly, everything’s so cutting-edge here I’m worried it won’t agree with me.”
Salome laughed and waved her remaining arm.
The true threat of Salome may not have been her extraordinary athletic ability or the
strategic ability needed to escape the entire Kamisato Faction. It was her ability to
conveniently repair herself with any materials she came across.
Then her tone grew more serious.
“Kamijou Touma. While I’m getting everything ready, you talk to everyone you know
here and see if any of them are acting oddly.”
“?”
“Not all attacks are made by harming your opponent in a visible way. Especially when it
comes to that goddamn stupid brother of mine. Just check over everyone. It couldn’t hurt,
right? And if you find your normal class, your normal club, your normal committee, and
your normal part-time job…well, that’s for the best, don’tcha think? That’s what I’m
hoping for. But…I think the odds are about 50/50. There’s gotta be about a 50% chance
of rain.”
Salome seemed to be sniffing something as she spoke.
Kamijou could not hope to guess what that crazy girl’s nose had picked up.
Regardless, the raincoat mass murderer said one final thing.
“I recognize this cloyingly sweet sense of bottomless candy. It’s just like that goddamn
stupid Kamisato harem.”
Between the Lines 3[edit]
What image comes to mind when people hear the term laboratory? Perhaps a storage
center for suspicious bacteria hidden deep in the mountains. Perhaps a development base
for new fighter craft built in the middle of the desert. Or perhaps a deep sea experiment
facility disguised as an offshore oil platform or a zero-g testing facility built into a space
station module.
A specialized research facility might sound like something needlessly large that could
never be paid for with personal funds. And it was true that not even an entire university
would be enough for an almighty all-in-one laboratory that allowed for research in every
field imaginable.
But on the other hand, a laboratory could be made quite compact if it only had the
absolute essentials.
For example, a metalworking lab that created firearms, a biological management lab that
cultivated viruses capable of wiping out a city of a million in under 24 hours, or a
pharmaceutical lab that created synthetic drugs that could become an unlimited source of
funds if used correctly. If one abandoned the scholarly idea of infinite possibilities and
focused on one clear “goal”, their laboratory could fit inside a port container.
Kihara Yuiitsu, a woman in a cheap suit and a lab coat, arrived in Academy City’s
District 17.
The district supported Academy City’s manufacturing industry infrastructure and was
almost entirely made up of unmanned factories, but Yuiitsu was not interested in the
factories themselves.
Containers were piled up in an abandoned factory that was no longer in use. There were
blank spaces everywhere like the result of a poor attempt at a puzzle game. A black
luxury car sat inside a space the size of a basketball court. It was incredibly long like a
dachshund that had taken a wrong turn somewhere along its evolutionary history.
Its development codename was Griffon Driver.
It was a bulletproof vehicle for VIPs originally developed for the twelve members of the
Board of Directors for use during World War Three. It used a policy of active defense (i.e.
remaining on the move at all times so no one would know where they were). From a
distance, it looked just like a limousine parked in front of a casino, but as Yuiitsu
approached, it became clear that it was over two meters tall and over twenty-five meters
long. Yuiitsu could step through the door while standing. The body was made of
composite armor, the bulletproof glass was more than fifty centimeters thick, and the
door rivaled a bank vault with its eight rods and vacuum lock. Rather than air, the tires
contained sponge in case of a hit from a sniper rifle or anti-tank mine and to prevent it
from rendering itself useless by blowing the tires under its own weight.
There were several of these vehicles.
These polished luxury vehicles lined up side-by-side were Kihara Yuiitsu’s fortress.
“Hello, Ms. Yuiitsu.”
A young male voice spoke over the radio.
Then a further flood of voices reached her.
“Hello!”
“Hi, Yuiitsu-san.”
“Keep up the good work.”
Despite all the greetings, no one stepped out of the driver’s seats. Yuiitsu did not bother
pulling out her radio and simply waved while looking to the front of each vehicle. They
asked no questions about their boss or the rear of the vehicles. The windows were all
tinted and there was a thick barrier between the driver’s seat and the rear area, so they
could see nothing. That was a basic courtesy in this business.
(Although it would probably cause a blood vessel to burst in their heads and give them a
brain hemorrhage if they knew a P4 level biological weapon was being cultivated in the
back of the vehicles they’re driving around the city all day.)
She walked toward one of the black vehicles and grabbed the knob to the back door.
Several forms of biometric authentication were run and the door opened surprisingly
easily.
The inside was entirely different.
A bluish infrared light illuminated the cold material that resembled silver stainless steel.
Kihara Yuiitsu stripped off all of her clothes in a small space, sterilized her entire body in
a complete decontamination room smaller than a phone booth, and put on a thick
protective suit before opening the door to the main area.
It resembled the plant factories that were popular lately. Something like water tanks with
no water inside were lined up on metal racks. The small digital counters on the glass
surface were apparently used to manage the temperature and humidity. But unlike a
tropical fish tank, there were two round holes in the sides of the tanks with thick rubber
plastic gloves attached on the inside. In other words, they were set up so work could be
done inside a completely sealed environment.
Each tank had about ten glass Petri dishes inside and the tanks were divided into multiple
levels on the metal racks covering the left and right walls.
Kihara Yuiitsu snapped her fingers to activate the room’s recording functions and
reported on her progress as if speaking to herself.
“Discard #17-25, discard #40-60, discard #130-156. Make #1, 9, and 30 the top
candidates. Make #5, 6, 70, and 99 the secondary candidates.”
She did not bother observing each and every Petri dish under a microscope.
The samples to be discarded would be instantly neutralized by frying them with powerful
ultraviolet and electron beams.
“Based on the traces left on the Anti-Art Attachment that was the foundation of Sensei’s
combat ability, we can estimate Kamisato Kakeru’s power to be an extremely sharp
cutting power that provides complete destruction without crushing the material along the
slice. He should have been able to destroy Sensei’s physical body as well as his weapon,
but it is unknown why he did not. We can abandon the idea of some uncertain idea of
good sense and assume there is some kind of condition needed to activate the power.”
She used the microscope to view the remaining Petri dishes, especially the ones labeled a
top candidate.
“That condition is unknown, but based on the traces on the armor, Kamisato Kakeru
seems to be focused on his right hand. Some of the marks even resemble a hand print. I
can’t think of any defense greater than that armor, so stopping an attack from him would
be nearly impossible. Thus, a long-term battle would be unrealistic.”
She never directly touched it.
Utterly separated by cold glass and thick plastic, she used a fine dropper to add in
chemicals by the nanogram as she looked after the cultivations.
“Kamisato Kakeru’s blood and tissue fragments were found on Sensei’s fangs. That
means he allowed Sensei to get close, so he either lacks a means of attacking at long
range or the environment prevented him from doing so.”
She did not add the same chemicals to any two Petri dishes labeled as top candidates.
They were all different.
She only needed one of them to fulfill her hypothesis.
“This leads to the conclusion that Kamisato Kakeru’s strange power uses some method
based on his physical body to aim at a mid- or close-range target. Whether it can be
defended against or dodged is unknown, so it should be assumed the activation of his
power means death.”
She spoke quietly as she stared at something that could continue wriggling even in the
coldest weather.
“In other words…”
She breathed in and out.
And she uttered the decisive words.
“The most effective attack method for Kamisato Kakeru is to ****** his ******** with
******* and *******.”
A sticky sound burst out.
Something had wrapped around the tip of the fine dropper Yuiitsu was using. Something
black was sticking out of the Petri dish. It also contained the colorful patterns of a
tropical frog or lizard.
She pulled on the fine dropper a few times, stared at the uncooperative sample with a
smile, and then laughed.
She said one last thing as she laughed.
“Isn’t that right, Shoggoth-chan?”
Phase 2:
Obtained a sample of the St. Germain virus used during the occupation of the high-rise
building centered on Kanou Shinka. Successfully cultivated the pill-shaped sample in a
Petri dish and attenuated it.
Even if I successfully sever Kamisato Kakeru’s right hand, the power inside might reject
me. I must rearrange my own brain to trick its recognition. I will use the traits of the St.
Germain virus for that overwriting.
Phase 3:
Obtained a sample of the Sample Shoggoth that acted as the bottleneck in the clash
between Kamijou and Kamisato concerning the Birdway Sisters. It is actually a variety of
Academy City’s #2, Dark Matter, but it ignores that esper’s will and can be controlled by
a third party. I will use it for the surgical requirements of severing and sewing on the
hand while connecting all of the blood vessels and nerves.
Using the above methods, she planned her revenge by stealing the right hand that made
Kamisato Kakeru unique and wielding it as her own.
She had also picked up on Kamisato Kakeru’s interpersonal relationships.
She of course wanted to physically approach him to gather information on World
Rejecter. But infiltrating what was known as the Kamisato Faction was deemed too
dangerous. Their unique sense of solidarity could not be obtained overnight.
Reports said he was making frequent visits to the student council.
If they had not been dyed in the colors of the Kamisato Faction, that would be the best
place to interfere.
She did not need to hold back, so she targeted the president at the very top.
After acquiring the requisite personal information, she targeted Keshouin Asuka.
She wanted to avoid anyone noticing the switch while she was in contact with Kamisato
Kakeru, so she had the real one stay at some far removed place. Until, that is, she had
gathered the necessary data and everything was ready to make her attack.
“Eeeeeeeeeeeeek! I didn’t like the sound of something turning up on this unplanned
health inspection, but what do you mean I have a max rare SSR-level parasite that only
one in seventy million people get?”
As a decoy, she gathered attention on the incinerator that was no longer in use.
If her cover was about to be blown before she had achieved her goal, she would shift
suspicion there to buy time to either continue or retreat. It was like a lizard’s tail. If
anyone grew dangerous, she would make them suspect the incinerator as a test to see just
how close to the truth they were concerning Keshouin Asuka.
“B-but they apparently give you a huge monetary reward if you volunteer for the clinical
trial of their new drug. Once this is over, I can buy Mie-chan a birthday present. Y-yeah!
I need to do my best!! I need to show my dignity as an u-u-upperclassman!!”
It would have been easier just to kill the girl.
That would eliminate all risk of having her cover blown.
But she did not.
Between good and evil it was evil, but between like and dislike it was like.
Those words came to her even without Kihara Enshuu’s emulation.
Part 5[edit]
“Ah, ah…”
He could only watch in a daze.
Kamijou Touma could only watch Salome fight using her dirty strategy.
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!”
Salome and Kihara Yuiitsu were continuing their clash.
But unlike before, the raincoat mass murderer was the one gaining ground. Yuiitsu was
well versed in killing techniques and had stolen World Rejecter from Kamisato Kakeru,
but Salome did not give up a single step and she clearly knew the secret to victory here.
“Clara. I need a sharper edge! Sacrifice yourself!!”
“!”
Salome was fighting empty-handed, but she was still wielding an invisible blade.
And she had more than just that one form of attack.
“Lime. I need more reach. Time for a trip to the graveyard!!”
“How can you tell people to die so easily!?”
Each time Salome made a request and a girl jumped in, her attack would change.
She literally used the girls as ingredients by breaking their weapons and sweeping their
bodies aside.
“Luca. I need to corner her with a quick barrage! You’re up!!”
“Dammit. At least put this to good use!”
It could be a blade, a blunt weapon, a gun, or a chain.
An invisible attack was hard enough to defend against or avoid as it was, but the level of
confusion only grew as she freely rearranged its range and type of damage.
It was truly the ultimate consumption strategy. In a nightmarish vision, more and more
girls collapsed, passed out, and were thrown away as she continued swapping out
weapons and attack methods.
And it did not stop there.
The essence of Salome’s ability was not the invisible attack; it was placing as many
different attacks as necessary on top of her empty hands.
Meaning…
“Flamethrower + katana.”
“…!!!!!”
The entire landscape was torn apart. Kihara Yuiitsu and even Kamijou, who was
watching from the side, felt their thoughts nearly grind to a halt. It had seemed like an
invisible attack from a nonexistent weapon, so the slash had seemed like an effect placed
on top of her empty hands. But that was wrong.
It was as if a ton of sharp Japanese swords shot out with the force of a flamethrower.
Kamijou gulped as Salome sacrificed even more girls, transformed them into dreadful
attacks, and sent them flying toward the woman in a lab coat and cheap suit.
“Tear gas + sledgehammer.”
Once, it was a pressure attack that scattered a blinding smokescreen that contained
physical pressure.
“Explosive + longbow + electric guitar.”
Once, it was an explosive acoustic weapon that blew out the target’s eardrums just by
plucking the strings.
“Stun gun + water gun + bullet + hammer throw.”
Once, it was a giant anti-materiel sniper bullet that’s ballistic path bent complexly like
electricity running along a body of water.
(Now I get it.)
Kamijou came to belated understanding of at least a portion of the darkness held by
Kamisato Kakeru.
Salome was not forcing the girls of the Kamisato Faction to sacrifice themselves. She
was not threatening them or coercing them. It was entirely voluntary. The girls were
delighted to offer up their own bodies and they wished to be destroyed. They gave up on
an individual victory in order to obtain a group victory. To put it another way, they did
not care what happened as long as they could save Kamisato Kakeru who had lost a hand
and was suffering from shock due to blood loss.
(That’s why it got to him. If he saw this, of course he’d blame the power that had
suddenly come to his right hand. This goes well beyond just being a group of friends!!)
It was not the power of his right hand that made Kamisato Kakeru special.
He had not realized it was him himself that had drawn all of those girls to him.
Kamijou had once told him that, but even he felt a chill run through his entire body now.
Hypothetically, if the girls surrounding Kamisato Kakeru truly were only a side effect of
his right hand, then wouldn’t they gradually change affiliation as that hand settled in with
Kihara Yuiitsu? Kamijou knew that would never happen, but the idea still reared its ugly
head like a meaningless theory about the world coming to an end.
But frustratingly enough, it was effective.
Kihara Yuiitsu was using her lab coat to divert the various attacks and keep the damage
to a minimum, but that shield of cloth was growing tattered. If the attacks continued, the
article of clothing would completely tear apart and no longer function as a shield. Once
she could no longer use it, it was all over. Salome continued changing her attack method,
adding on new traits, and raising her destructive power with her never-ending chain.
Once she got going, she really did seem to become an unstoppable force.
“!!”
Kihara Yuiitsu must not have wanted a long battle because she took a somewhat forceful
step forward.
She put herself in danger to move closer and she swung her forcibly attached right hand.
Its shadow crawled along Salome’s body.
And this other monster spoke the words needed to stop the raincoat mass murderer’s
violence.
“Do you wish for a new world?”
This time.
This time Kamijou Touma’s mind truly went blank.
He did not even have time to shout Salome’s name.
This one was fatal. It had been a clean hit. The woman had spoken the words with her
hand’s shadow entirely placed on the girl’s body. When World Rejecter activated, it held
enough power to defeat even Magic Gods by the dozen. Salome’s body would be swiftly
“exiled” to the spare territory between related timelines. Basically, a living human being
would be sent to another world, never to be seen again.
Or so it should have been.
“Of course that won’t work. Don’t take the Kamisato Faction so lightly, especially when
you’re just borrowing that thing.”
Kamijou had only seen one side of the previous events, so this was beyond his
understanding.
But Kamisato Kakeru’s right hand only blew away indecisive people who had conflicting
desires. And anyone he had accepted had no such conflicting desires and had found a
single path to follow in this wide world.
Patricia Birdway had been the same.
It was because she had that qualification that Kamisato Kakeru had been able to rub her
head and shake her hand. He had accepted her personality and announced his respect for
her specifically because of the pure mind that prevented her from being blown away by
the touch of that hand.
So…
“World Rejecter’s not gonna work on anyone from the Kamisato Faction, don’tcha think?
After all, we were all accepted by Kamisato Kakeru and we’ve all proven that we don’t
have any conflicting desires.”
“…”
Kihara Yuiitsu must not have known about that condition.
If she had, she would not have been so careless. That was hardly surprising since she had
only just stolen the right hand and her knowledge of it was based on the “mistaken
warning” that Kamijou had let slip.
On top of that, Salome had made a show of avoiding her right hand until now.
“And I’m sorry to say, Miss Revenge, that I’m willing to kill if it’s for that goddamn
stupid brother who so enjoys that creepy harem of his! That conviction will never be
shaken!!”
But even so, the mistake was a devastating one.
Once the initial attack failed, this was back in Mass Murderer Salome’s territory.
She had consumed so many girls to thoroughly polish up her External Offering’s chain.
She could now slice a warship in two with a single swing of her arm and she swung that
arm almost casually.
Kihara Yuiitsu gave up on using her shield.
For the first time, she jumped to the side with all her might to dodge.
But not even that was enough.
A moment later, Kihara Yuiitsu’s right hand was severed with a noise so pleasant it
seemed out of place.
The rough black threads that had sewn on the stolen hand were torn. It was not a perfect
cut, but it made it more than two-thirds of the way through and it looked even more
painful dangling there only partially severed.
“First, I’ll be taking that right hand back.”
The raincoat girl smiled fiercely.
“That belongs to my goddamn stupid brother. That power was given to Kamisato Kakeru.
Figuring out how to deal with it is his job, so an outsider like you can’t decide for him.”
“Hee hee.”
Then something odd happened.
Kihara Yuiitsu laughed despite having her right hand more than two-thirds severed.
“It’s true I didn’t know the exact conditions for activating World Rejecter. But you seem
to be mistaken about something too. Perhaps I’m only aware of this thanks to gaining the
power for myself.”
“?”
“Such strange symbolism. Just like Imagine Breaker is both the power to reject and a
reference point or restoration point for everything, World Rejecter is both the power to
accept and something like deletion software. Instead of simply destroying its target, it
erases it by processing it into something no one can read.”
She sounded calm and she did not stop.
“Maybe that was a little off topic. No, I suppose not. World Rejecter holds the power to
erase Magic Gods by the dozen, but it does not completely destroy them. If you can never
see them again, it might as well be death, but that isn’t quite accurate.”
“Salome… This isn’t good. Fall back. This is really, really bad!!”
“If it can send them there, this right hand must cross between the two territories. You can
think of it like Dejima during the isolationist Sakoku period. And if this right hand acts as
a convenient ‘end of the world’ for what lies on the other side…”
Kamijou felt something crawl down his back.
He could not let her say this.
This alone he could never let her say.
And then Kihara Yuiitsu raised her nearly destroyed right hand as if to smash those
strange warning bells in his mind.
She held it forward.
“…then wouldn’t I also be able to use it like this? …Paging Niang-Niang.”
Something bubbled out from Kihara Yuiitsu’s wrist…no, from within the right hand.
“Ah.”
Before Kamijou’s thoughts caught up, it was already beginning.
Something flowed out from the gaping wound. It resembled a sticky fluid and it wrapped
around Kihara Yuiitsu’s arm as it moved up to her shoulder. Its surface began bubbling
even more intensely.
Something was swelling out from her shoulder.
It looked like two arms were attached to the same shoulder, but that was inaccurate.
Something had grown there.
Something long and slender had crawled up from the broken right hand and grown out
from the shoulder.
“Ahhh.”
It was a slender girl’s body. Her skin was far too pale to be a living human, a charm was
attached to her forehead, a white mini China dress covered her body, and a provocative
look filled her eyes.
“Niang-Niang. She should have only been able to appear ‘within’ the right hand, but you
just had to do this, didn’t you? Even when they sealed off the nation, Western ideas still
found their way in and everyone who saw the black ships floating out at sea could not
help but tremble. In the same way, you might be able to restrict their coordinates, but
there is no way to suppress the very existence of a god.”
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!?”
Kamijou Touma screamed at the top of his lungs.
A moment later, Niang-Niang spread her arms and all ten fingers transformed into
independent swords, spears, axes, staffs, etc. They all shook like musical instruments and
sent out a high-pitched din.
And…
And…
And…
This was the ultimate majesty of a god.
It was what lurked within a certain boy’s right hand.
The power of a supposedly defeated Magic God filled the dark night of that school.
Part 6[edit]
Starting in District 7, a hopelessly powerful shockwave swept across Academy City.
Part 7[edit]
To be honest, Misaka Mikoto was hoping for some kind of excitement.
Just the day before, she had run across a raincoat girl while walking around town at night.
That girl had seemed to exist beyond all common sense and she smugly wielded a “new
possibility”. That was a great hope for Misaka Mikoto who was just stewing at the
moment. Tokiwadai’s Ace had inappropriately hoped that she might find some more
excitement that would act as a road sign.
But once she flinched back from that tremor in the earth, she felt her head rapidly cooling.
She realized just how much her mind had been boiling.
“What…was that?”
She turned toward it.
Something she was unfamiliar with was there. If she went there, she could find out what
it was. A new world would open up before her eyes. However, she felt none of the
previous elation. Her heart began pounding in her chest, but it only contained an ominous
tension. She could tell something she did not want to see and did not want to accept
awaited her there.
It seemed to be at a school.
Based on the size of the campus and the number of school buildings, it may have been a
combined middle and high school.
But the metal fence had toppled, the trees had fallen, and the recently restored glass had
shattered.
People were collapsed all over the schoolyard, but were they really students? Several
dozen girls of middle and high school age were passed out there.
And on top if it all, she saw three other people.
One was a raincoat girl who had been torn to pieces.
One was a spiky-haired boy holding that “wreckage” while lying bloody on the ground.
One was a woman in a lab coat and cheap suit who had a truly bizarre monster growing
from her right arm.
She did not actually say anything.
Her scream was more like pure noise.
Misaka Mikoto ran past the collapsed fence and toward the boy. Kamijou Touma looked
unsteadily back at her while holding the raincoat who had lost everything below her waist
and whose head was bent at an odd angle. He mouthed the words “stay away”, but she
could not obey that.
“Heh heh.”
The lab coat woman did not seem particularly bothered by the sudden intruder.
With an odd noise, the right arm with its split wrist underwent a great transformation.
“Eh heh heh.”
Something happened as the boy and girls watched on.
A mini-China girl had already come from that right arm, but now some even odder things
burst from the shoulder.
One was a tall gentle-looking blond man with fur attached much like a lion’s mane.
One was a brown man with a black, polished round mirror in place of a leg.
One was a young and beautiful woman with a black Western mourning dress and a veil of
the same color hiding her expression.
One was a half-naked young man with war paint tattoos covering his entire body and a
silver prosthetic for his left arm.
Including the mini-China, there were five in all.
The original human hand was hidden from view as if buried inside a sea anemone. The
five figures had become giant fingers and the whole functioned as a gigantic hand which
the lab coat woman freely opened and closed as her new fingers.
“Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!”
Her loud laughter seemed to rule the world.
“Yes, yes! This right hand truly is unfair. They’re not the strange ones. The problem is
this World Rejecter that allows them to appear in this world despite belonging to another
category altogether!!”
“…un.”
As Mikoto ran toward him, bloody Kamijou opened his mouth while trying to catch his
breath.
“Run… We’re…we’re no match for them…for that…”
“What are you-…?”
“They’re…”
Could he not even raise his dangling arm and point forward?
He looked like he was going to stop breathing at any moment, but he forced his lungs to
keep working and squeezed out the words.
And they were nightmarish words indeed.
“You remember…that Magic God called the High Priest, right? They’re all like that.
…She can pull out monsters on his level by the dozen!!”
Her mind went blank.
This went beyond blanking out her memories or thoughts.
Her very sense of self vanished.
She thought the individual named Misaka Mikoto would be smashed to pieces.
After all, there was no way they could win. After fleeing through Academy City on the
acrobike, it had been someone else who had ultimately finished off the High Priest. If that
had failed, the Arrowhead Comet might have blown away Academy City.
And there were more than one?
They were going to attack by the dozen?
“……………………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………”
Mikoto desperately supported Kamijou’s bloody back and turned her head.
And she saw…
“Eh heh.”
A monster.
That hopeless lab coat monster was laughing in the moonlight.
“Yes, yes. Involving unrelated people in your personal revenge is foolish. Between good
and evil it’s evil, and between like and dislike it’s dislike… Sensei never would have
allowed this. Ah ha ha.”
“Pant…pant…”
“But I don’t care. It may be different from Sensei, but that’s what makes it so
wonderful. I’m realizing that more and more now. I still have a long way to go and I’m
still pathetically soft like clay, but…that’s exactly why. I must not hesitate to mold each
little thing into shape to create my unique path. Yes, yes…no. Maybe abandoning your
ideals for your goal is another form of romance. But anyway…”
She tilted her head a little.
She held out that right hand which held the greatest and most dreadful power.
“If you’re going to interfere, then die. Right here and now.”
It was all a copy of that day.
Misaka Mikoto had clenched her teeth at her own powerlessness while fleeing from the
High Priest.
And now they did not even have the convenient acrobike.
Plus, the Magic Gods would be approaching by the dozen.
Part 8[edit]
“Kh…!?”
A small form groaned in an Academy City hospital.
It was Patricia Birdway.
She was the girl who had a large part of her body replaced by a Magic God known as
Nephthys.
Part 9[edit]
Kamijou was pretty sure his consciousness had repeatedly cut out intermittently over the
course of a few seconds.
Once his mind finally stabilized like a fluorescent light on the verge of dying, he realized
Misaka Mikoto was carrying him over her shoulder.
His vision was spinning, he felt the biting night wind, an odd sense of floating lifted his
stomach, he felt the vibration of non-solid footing like building walls and signs, they
were moving with overwhelming speed while seemingly ignoring gravity altogether, and
the lights from car headlights and building windows were trailing behind them at
unbelievable angles.
He gradually realized what was happening.
(She’s using magnetism or something else to jump from building to building?)
Since he was draped over her shoulder, his unsteady vision saw the scenery behind them.
And he saw something there.
Mikoto was jumping from wall to wall of the high-rise buildings without using any
noticeable footholds, but someone was accurately following her.
It was Kihara Yuiitsu, usurper of World Rejecter.
She had forcibly drawn out the power of the many Magic Gods that Kamisato Kakeru
had blown away.
“…I’m sorry.”
Kamijou gulped and heard a trembling girl’s voice in his ear.
It came from Mikoto who was at the center of the action.
Something major must have happened because the tattered cloth of her coat was carried
away by the wind.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry for wanting some excitement and wanting to leave the normal rails
without knowing what that meant. If this is because of me…because I asked for
this…then…uuh…”
Kamijou did not know what lay at the foundation of those words.
He was unsure how to respond as she held him.
“She’s been like this the whole time. There’s nothing as bad as a depressed romantic,
don’tcha think? Who knows when she’s gonna take a dive from the top of a long
escalator.”
“Eh? Ah? Wah!? Salome!?”
Kamijou was so surprised because he had not thought the weight clinging to his back was
enough to be a human being. It was only as heavy as a collapsible bicycle or maybe a
little heavier. He hesitantly turned his head and saw the silver-haired girl’s head close
enough to rub her cheek against his upper arm. However, he did not feel her legs because
everything below her navel had likely been destroyed.
It was a lot like how self-proclaimed TV personalities would wrap a cardigan’s sleeves
around their neck.
In addition to the feminine softness (even if her body was technically artificial), he felt
something pointed and hard that must have been the toy pocket watch hanging from her
neck.
She may have made sure to protect that even if it meant losing her lower body.
“Oh, dammit. This must be what I get for tearing Claire in two. This has gotta be what
they mean when they talk about karma.”
“What kind of visual is this!? I’m being carried like a bag of rice by a middle school girl
who’s jumping around the city at night and I’ve got a mass murderer clinging to my back
after being torn to pieces!? Fake ghost photos are less horrifying than this!”
“Well, of course the killers stand out more than the killed. And this isn’t the time for a
nice chat, don’tcha think? …That woman’s way crazier than me and she’s about to reach
us!!”
Kihara Yuiitsu’s right arm had split apart at the shoulder. It formed the five upper bodies
of the five Magic Gods. One of them moved. It was the one that looked like a small girl
with pale skin and a white mini-China.
It was Niang-Niang.
Her fingers transformed into swords, spears, axes, staffs, etc.
Those weapons tore through the dark night like laser beams.
No lightning surged from the tips of the blades and the spears were not actually thrown.
They extended.
The ten weapons grew explosively and spread out in a fan shape. Shocked, Mikoto
quickly used magnetism to change direction in midair and just barely avoided them. One
after another, they stabbed into the wall of a nearby building.
“…”
Next thing she knew, there was a face there.
The concept of distance was meaningless. It took her a moment to realize that Niang-
Niang’s weapons had shrunk back down and forcibly “pulled” her and Kihara Yuiitsu to
instantly fill the gap between them.
Yuiitsu twisted her body in midair to unleash a kick.
This absolute method would create bubbles in the blood and kill anyone cleanly hit by it,
so Salome placed her half-destroyed but still artificial body in the path of the attack and
the heavy blow struck her body.
Mikoto shouted something.
She could no longer feel the weight of Salome or of Kamijou.
She wondered whether to go after the boy or fight back against the threat before her eyes,
but then the lab coat woman held out her right arm.
She recognized what grew from there.
It was the strange being that had appeared before Mikoto and Kamijou almost for fun
while they were being pursued by the High Priest.
It was the owner of the strange weapons that had pierced her flat chest.
It was Niang-Niang.
“…!!!???”
Her fighting spirit was drowned out by fear.
Niang-Niang’s fingers seemed to explode and the many weapons shot forward at close
range. Mikoto immediately created a shield out of iron sand, but a dreadful impact ran
through it. She flew back like she had been shot point-blank by a shotgun with only a
metal door to protect her. She fell toward the scattered artificial lights of the city’s night.
“Gaaaah!?”
Meanwhile, Kamijou crashed through a nearby building window like an artillery shell.
The spiky-haired boy bounced along the dusty floor with Salome along for the ride like a
backpack. He finally stopped when his back slammed into an exposed square column.
There were no partitions and no wallpaper. There was nothing but identical columns at
regular intervals.
He smelled glue and synthetic fiber construction boards.
(The building’s…under construction?)
“And what happened to Misaka?”
“We have bigger things to worry about! Here she comes!!”
He did not know why, but Kamijou felt an unpleasant sweat covering his entire body.
He immediately moved from the column and rolled to the side as a fierce rush pursued
him from outside the window.
It was just like machinegun fire.
Some kind of projectile flew in at incredible speed. Kamijou could no longer follow them
visually. As he fled to another column and glanced back at the floor, he did not see
obvious bullet holes.
He saw masses of darkness the size of baseballs.
They must have been bending the light because the surrounding scenery stretched a bit
like candy art. It looked like everything was being sucked in toward the center.
“That’s gotta be pomegranate seeds,” said Salome. “This would be Persephone…no,
maybe Proserpina. Anyway, there’s a legend of a goddess being taken to the underworld,
falling for a trick on the way back to the surface, eating a pomegranate of the underworld,
and being unable to remove the curse of death. That fruit forcibly brings one to the
underworld…to death. However it happens, there’s no escape once they get inside you.”
“…”
Was this another Magic God like Niang-Niang?
However, Kamijou finally took an intentionally slow breath.
He was still covered in an ominous sweat, but his tension was now directed elsewhere.
“This is odd.”
“What is? And can someone raised in Academy City really analyze magic?”
“It’s not that.”
Kamijou leaned against the square column to hide with Salome positioned between
himself and the column.
“Or rather, all of this is odd.”
“?”
“It does look like Yuiitsu is using magic and I’m willing to bet your analysis is correct.
But she isn’t Kihara Kagun…that is, Bersi. I doubt there are all that many Kiharas that
can just use magic like this. This probably really is that…Proserpina? person’s spell
though.”
“This isn’t a web novel and I don’t have time to listen to you go on and on about your
interests. Try to keep it under 140 characters.”
“If this was a Magic God’s attack, I doubt this would work as a shield,” rapidly summed
up Kamijou. “At full power, Othinus could instantly crush the galaxy down to its pre-Big
Bang state. And with some of his power gone, the High Priest could fuse with a comet
and bring an ice age to the earth. Yet we’re fine just by hiding behind a column? They’re
firing like crazy and we defended against it with a mere shield? That’s not possible. The
Magic God brand isn’t that cheap.”
His mind had gone blank because Niang-Niang, a major figure for that brand, had
appeared.
But even that was odd.
Even if Kihara Yuiitsu could draw out the power of those many Magic Gods, she
wouldn’t need to show it off. Kamijou and the others had no way of killing a Magic God.
It was hard to say they had even defeated Othinus or the High Priest.
The Magic Gods were just like an immortal monster from an old splatter film. You ran
across them in an unreasonable encounter, you were chased around by them, and the best
you could hope for was to escape in the very, very end. There simply was no defeating
them. Even the police or the army would be killed if they challenged them to a straight
fight. That was what the Magic Gods were supposed to be.
World Rejecter might be the only thing in the entire world that could defeat them. That
was what made that right hand so special. And at the moment, Kihara Yuiitsu had
exclusive use of that hand. She had both the wild beast and its natural predator.
In other words, nothing made any sense from the moment they had survived Niang-Niang
appearing in that dark schoolyard.
“I think Kihara Yuiitsu is definitely using magic.”
Kamijou gulped.
“But I think she’s using something other than the Magic Gods.”
“I don’t think we have time to sit around and think! Dammit!!”
Someone ignored all common sense and jumped in through the high-rise building’s
window.
It was a woman in a cheap suit whose tattered lab coat fluttered like demon wings as
several Magic Gods grew from her right arm.
“Heh heh.”
She may have been laughing, but that was not comforting in the slightest.
The force and pitch of her voice were unstable, so it scorched the nerves of anyone who
heard it.
“Eh heh heh.”
There was no speaking with her.
Even if they did exchange words, they could never share in what she was feeling.
“Heh heh heh hah hah!!!!”
Of the five Magic Gods, it was of course Niang-Niang that moved.
Ten weapons shot from her ten fingers and tore through space like laser beams.
But…
Even so…
Nevertheless…
Kamijou Touma’s right hand easily deflected those surefire attacks.
He did not even need his fist.
It was the casual action of brushing aside a fly.
Kamijou had destroyed Niang-Niang’s weapons with Imagine Breaker back when the
countless weapons had shot from her sleeve and pierced Mikoto’s chest.
But even so, this was different.
There was tension, unease, and even fear.
But those nerve-frying and dangerous emotions were only those caused by Kihara Yuiitsu
herself. With five extraordinary monsters like the Magic Gods, he could easily have
given up on any attempt to fight and passed out.
But he had finally seen it.
He had grasped the truth.
“Those aren’t the real Magic Gods.”
He looked at his enemy again.
He faced their true identity.
“They aren’t even ‘what lurks inside that right hand’.”
It was odd that he had been able to deflect a Magic God’s attack with just one hand.
He relied on that sense that something was not right.
“Those are only fakes made to look like the Magic Gods. Yes, you let Sample Shoggoth
invade your body in order to attach that severed right hand!!”
That was the same thing that had once eaten into Patricia Birdway.
It was an amorphous monster that could take any form.
He had no idea how she had tamed it and it may have been eating into her as they spoke,
but she had accepted it as her weapon despite the risk.
Which meant…
“You created models of the Magic Gods and you had some seemingly-related magic
prepared from somewhere else. …The attenuated St. Germain virus. It’s hard to believe,
but you apparently surrendered your own brain to trick the right hand’s recognition. If
I’m remembering right, the people controlled by that could use magic regardless of their
original knowledge or ability! Specifically, they could use magic related to carbon and
plants, and that means that pomegranate spell you just used!!”
She had just been borrowing the Magic Gods’ reputation.
By creating a hollow image of them and using magic when she should not have been able
to, she had made it look like she had summoned the Magic Gods.
Also, Kihara Yuiitsu had switched strategies as soon as she had learned World Rejecter
was useless against Mass Murderer Salome and the rest of the Kamisato Faction girls.
In other words, she had wanted to change the stagnant and unfavorable mood covering
the dark schoolyard. World Rejecter had proved less almighty than hoped, so she had
wanted to give it new value using the great impact of…no, the bluff of drawing out the
Magic Gods at will.
She had even intentionally let her hand nearly be severed as part of the act.
“Come to think of it, a Magic God and something crawling out of a right arm were part of
Baggage City. At the very end there, the incomplete Othinus destroyed my wrist and then
crushed what came out. And Kihara Kagun and some other Kiharas were there. Kihara
Yuiitsu, were you there too by any chance? Maybe in a position that gave you access to a
report on everything that happened?”
That was why she had been able to do it.
She had what it took to come up with that strategy, to prepare everything needed to pull it
off, and to put on an act that would fool even someone who had actually met the Magic
Gods.
Once he knew that, there was nothing to be afraid of.
There was no more need to be bound by fear.
His opponent was not absolute. She was only human, so out of fear of defeat, she had
thought up a trick and twisted the truth to make herself look greater than she was.
He had to correct that.
He had to solve that.
He had to reveal that.
But Kihara Yuiitsu only tilted her head a little as she held up her misshapen right arm.
“So what?”
This had done nothing to her.
She had taken no damage whatsoever.
An explosive noise followed.
Niang-Niang, Proserpina, and the Magic Gods of unknown names stickily lost their shape
and became a single large stream which surged toward Kamijou like sticky pollution
sprayed from a water truck.
“!!”
He immediately held up his right hand.
“How many times do I have to tell you? My goal has been revenge from the beginning.”
Her voice reached him.
That cruel parasitic lifeform tore into one’s flesh with its countless fangs and claws,
slipped inside the body, and melted the fat away to reside within its new host. Kihara
Yuiitsu remained unfazed as that precious weapon was blown away by his right hand.
Making a flashy attack like that forced Kamijou to use his right hand.
In the meantime, he was pinned to the spot and could not move or flee.
She had used up Project Shoggoth just to hold him in place.
“The power of the Magic Gods never mattered. Whether I could reach that level or not
was irrelevant. I only needed to mow down Kamisato Kakeru and everyone he cares for.
Between good and evil it’s evil, and between like and dislike it’s dislike. This is my
unique romance that not even Sensei could reach. To put it another way, the Magic Gods’
power would have been entirely meaningless if I couldn’t use it for my revenge. That’s
all this is.”
“…”
“You idiot! Don’t try to block that!!”
By the time Salome shouted from his back, it was too late.
Kihara Yuiitsu’s foot was flying his way.
Just like when a ball was suddenly thrown at someone, Kamijou reflexively held his arms
up to guard. He immediately realized that was a mistake.
Yuiitsu’s attacks were not meant to thrash him with their great speed or weight.
The shockwaves propagating from the multiple points of impact would shake his blood in
a way that created enough bubbles to make this single attack deadly.
In other words, it did not matter if he blocked it or not.
It was like a needle soaked in deadly poison. Once it touched him, it was all over.
“Ah…gah!!!???”
Intense heat filled his arm and he could feel it flowing from his arm to his torso.
Salome took action on his back.
“Damn you!!”
This time his supposed ally struck his aching arm.
Immediately, the strange heat vanished.
“Hm. So you used the same sort of shockwaves to counteract the bubbles. Well done
copying it in so short a time.”
Yuiitsu did not sound amused in the slightest.
“But didn’t I tell you? This was always about my revenge. I am taking my own path and
it is different from Sensei’s. That’s why I’m not too picky about this kind of thing.”
“…”
“I’ll use whatever it takes. That includes magic, martial arts, and even…something like
this.”
She reached into her tattered lab coat’s pocket.
That action sent an unpleasant sensation down Kamijou’s spine, but even as close as
Yuiitsu was, he did not have time to stop her.
A moment later, she held an oddly-shaped gun.
It almost looked like a toy. Rather than a handgun optimized for military use, it looked
like the starting pistol fired to begin an athletics festival race.
But he could tell.
His throat went dry as she aimed it his way.
“This is the UL Exploder. Then again, your average person might not be able to figure
out where its name comes from or how it does what it does.”
As soon as she pulled the trigger, space itself seemed to explode.
Part 10[edit]
When the blast struck the boy, he flew across the partially constructed building.
He was tossed right out a window that lacked any glass.
“Now, then.”
(My data says he is a top priority target for Kamisato Kakeru. Not that I expect being
thrown from the twentieth floor will kill him.)
Yuiitsu slowly walked toward the window while shaking her cheap-looking handgun that
was reminiscent of an athletics festival starting pistol. The surging river of her right arm
audibly dispersed and the original slender arm reappeared from the eye of the storm.
The injury to the wrist had been forcibly sewn back together.
That also meant Kamisato Kakeru’s right hand was connected to her once more.
The UL Exploder induced false dust explosions. It was only effective within Academy
City, so even one step outside the city and it would be entirely useless. However, it had
not been originally developed to cause anything as dubiously effective as a dust
explosion.
The voyeur of a Board Chairman had covered the city with nanodevices known as
Underline.
By gathering them together and detonating them, she could create a space that, for a very
short period of time, could not be monitored by the higher ups. With that in mind, its
name should make a fair amount of sense.
She had built this during a happier time.
When she had shown it off to the golden retriever who she respected more than anyone
else, he had praised her skill yet still scolded her for some reason.
Yes, he had said not to bully “him”.
“…”
For just a moment, Kihara Yuiitsu’s eyes gently narrowed.
But they returned to normal a moment later.
The warm kindness of what remained in her heart led her to coldly freeze her expression
all the more.
“It’s about time I finished this.”
Between good and evil it was evil, and between like and dislike it was dislike.
She knew that, yet that monster continued down her own path.
The one traveling that unique path was not interested in the concepts of good and evil that
controlled the masses.
“For whatever reason, Kamisato Kakeru needs Kamijou Touma. I can’t wait to see the
look on his face when I toss the boy’s corpse in front of him.”
Part 11[edit]
There was nothing he could do.
Kamijou Touma was thrown out into the dark sky with Salome clinging to his back.
“Waaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
hh!?”
Flailing his limbs around was meaningless.
The countless invisible hands of gravity grabbed at his body and forced him down toward
the ground. Needless to say, he would die on impact.
His fall had started at the twentieth floor and salvation came at the tenth floor halfway
down.
Misaka Mikoto was clinging to the wall there and she matched their relative speeds to
catch Kamijou in her arms.
“Gh…!!” she groaned. “Are you okay?”
“What happened with you after that? You aren’t hurt, are you?”
Mikoto stood on the building wall and let her shoes slide down to negate the impact, but
Kamijou’s eyes were focused upwards.
“Our questions can wait!”
“Yeah, it’s looking like we have bigger things to worry about!!”
The enemy was coming from up there.
She used the amorphous Sample Shoggoth to cling to the wall and crawl down like a
strange insect. The monster named Kihara Yuiitsu had locked onto them.
“Run, Misaka!! If you aren’t going to make it otherwise, then leave me behind!!”
It was too late.
An explosion burst directly behind Kihara Yuiitsu. It was likely the power of that
mysterious handgun-shaped device she had used to toss Kamijou and Salome out the
window earlier. This time, she used the explosive blast to accelerate her own body and
she approached with the speed of an artillery shell. She fell far faster than free fall in a
suicidal dive toward the depths of the earth or toward the underworld.
The distance between them vanished in an instant.
Truly just an instant.
“!!”
Mikoto immediately kicked off the wall and threw herself into the night sky with
Kamijou in her arms. Having missed her target, Yuiitsu slammed on the brakes using that
same wall and she did not hesitate to aim her UL Exploder at them. As she pulled the
trigger, small explosions several meters across pursued Mikoto through the air.
They never actually hit Mikoto, but they greatly restricted her range of movement. Then
Yuiitsu played her next hand.
It was literally a hand.
Her entire right arm changed form. It became a black torrent which bent like a whip and
struck the girl’s entire body from above.
This time, there was no avoiding it.
With a tremendous roar, Mikoto’s body was sent hurtling toward the ground.
She tried to attach to another building with magnetism, but it was too late.
She only managed to shift her landing point a little.
“Gah!?”
After slipping from the girl’s arms, Kamijou and Salome fell into one of the trees placed
at even intervals alongside a major road. Multiple branches broke beneath them which
eliminated enough of their momentum. He just barely avoided dying from the fall, but
now he had scratches all over his body.
“Agh…cough, cough! Wh-where did Misaka end up?”
“Focus on what’s above us instead!!”
Salome warned him from his back, but then something unexpected happened.
“…What?”
“She isn’t…coming?”
Kihara Yuiitsu’s next attack never came.
That in and of itself was delightful, but there had to be more to it than that. That woman
had no reason to be cautious or hold back, so this result was strange.
“What is she looking at?”
Kamijou caught his breath while looking up at Yuiitsu as she clung upside-down to the
building wall.
The monster was not even looking their way. She was focused elsewhere.
Also, Mikoto was not with them.
She seemed to have fallen somewhere else.
“Dammit. Is Misaka her top priority!?”
Part 12[edit]
Misaka Mikoto made sure nothing was wrong with her bones and organs after her fall.
She moved each of her fingers and toes and took deep breaths to see if anything hurt.
(Where am I?)
The ceiling was far overhead and she could guess she had been the one to create the hole
there. Once she got up, she found a space much larger than a school gym. Based on the
facilities and equipment, it seemed to be a cold storage warehouse, but it was not
functioning. It was room temperature and actually warmer than the December night
outside.
However, that was not what bothered her most of all.
“What…is this?”
The warehouse was not lined with ice cream and other frozen foods or fish and other
meat products.
There were weapons.
Just a lot of weapons.
There was a missile pod shaped like a giant container. There was long excavation drill
that could probably break through a bank vault door. There was a flamethrower and a
plasma blade. There was even the weapon from which Mikoto’s signature Railgun got its
name. She also saw the ammunition, fuel, power sources, and maintenance equipment for
them all.
Surprisingly, they did not seem made to be loaded on tanks, armored trucks, fighter craft,
attack craft, cruisers, or battleships.
(You’re kidding, right?)
As she looked across, circled around, and observed the mountain of weaponry, Mikoto
reached a general and unbelievable conclusion.
(Are these weapons meant to be directly equipped to and used by someone? What kind of
crazy concept were these designed for?)
She doubted these would be stored in a mere cold storage warehouse.
She did not know why someone had stored them here, but the cold storage warehouse
was clearly just camouflage.
She heard a small sound from the mountain of silhouettes.
She thought someone was hiding there, but that was not the case.
With a great roar, the collection of machines rose up like a plesiosaur and looked down at
her. Just like metal nails sucked in by a powerful magnet, the countless weapons were
gathering together and taking a biological form.
(Is this thing…appraising me as its user…?)
Mikoto gulped and looked at it once more.
“Anti…”
She traced her fingers along the barrel of a Gatling gun twice her height that had not
joined the plesiosaur and she read off the letters engraved there.
“Anti-Art Attachment…?”
Misaka Mikoto did not understand what that meant.
But a fleeting thought occurred to her. If she had this, might she be able to oppose an
extraordinary monster like Kihara Yuiitsu? She did not know what kind of operating
system it used, but as Academy City’s most powerful Electromaster, might she be able to
hack into that system, rewrite it, and hijack it?
It helped that a burning tension assaulted her.
That woman in a lab coat and cheap suit had surpassed the category of a single human
and seemed to send great pressure toward Mikoto from the darkness surrounding the girl
on all sides.
No matter how dulled by peace she was, Mikoto could not imagine exposing herself to
the city’s dangerous night while unarmed.
The thought came to her almost like a devilish temptation.
It may have been unfortunate for her that she had been separated from Kamijou Touma.
“————”
She slowly exhaled and once more placed her hand on the giant Gatling gun.
She tried to reveal the structure of its system to see if she could use it or not.
Something happened almost immediately.
“…!!!???”
She felt a strange chill like a giant tongue licking vertically across her entire back, so she
instinctually let go.
It was not just this one weapon. She heard the strange sounds of the various machines in
the large warehouse linking together.
What was she to do?
Was she prepared to grab this and pay the price?
(What…was that?)
Her heart was pounding. An unpleasant sweat poured from her forehead. Inescapable
confusion filled her mind. To repeat, Misaka Mikoto was Academy City’s strongest
Electromaster. She could directly control electricity, so there was no programming
language she could not read and no firewall she could not break. Even if it was a brand
new sort of firewall built in a completely unknown language, it had already nearly raised
the white flag just by relying on electricity in the first place.
Yet she had been unable to read it.
There was an entirely blank spot.
No, it was not that there was simply nothing written there. The weapon operating system
was laid out in exacting detail, but with that alone, the circle was closed and it did not
function as a circuit. And that blank spot was clearly filled with something Misaka
Mikoto was unfamiliar with or could not understand.
What was it?
What was that system built to control?
It was shaped like a weapon, but it was not a weapon. It wore the skin of science, but it
could not be explained using science. It reminded her of the stimulation, expanse, and
possibilities she had felt in her clash with Mass Murderer Salome, but this was much
stronger. It was hopelessly powerful and seemed to have no end at all.
A human might be able to manage the water filling a cup.
But that same human could not hope to manage all of the seawater filing the seven seas.
If she dove in or incorporated this into herself, she would more than just drown. The
waves would toss her about and dash her against the rocks until she changed form like the
fine white sand of the beaches. Then it would drag her down to the watery depths and the
immense pressure would crush her until she had no form left at all.
There was a brand new possibility here and it might allow her to peer into a world she
had never before seen, but if she did that, it would be “someone else” standing there, not
Misaka Mikoto. Or so it seemed to her.
She took back what she had thought before.
The threat she felt here was equal to or possibly even greater than what awaited outside.
The threat in here – or the identity of what it would produce – far surpassed what she
could handle on her own.
She must not touch this dragon.
Doing so would definitively set her growth in the wrong direction.
If she wished to walk by that boy’s side, she could not continue this way.
She could not.
She could not.
She could not.
Part 13[edit]
As Kihara Yuiitsu clung upside-down to the building wall using Sample Shoggoth, she
stared into the cold storage warehouse through the hole and clicked her tongue.
This was the first major unexpected event for her.
(Damn, I missed one. You’re telling me there was an entire spare storage warehouse for
Sensei’s Anti-Art Attachment left over!?)
That golden retriever had stored his equipment in all twenty-three districts of Academy
City. As his aide, Kihara Yuiitsu had been aware of Kihara Noukan’s “possessions” to a
certain extent, but her knowledge had not been perfect.
Kihara Noukan had stood out even among the Kiharas and he had been working with
Board Chairman Aleister.
Even if their technique had been as bizarre as could be, the basic frame around it was just
a powered suit and thus entirely belonged to the science side.
And now Academy City’s #3 had fallen there.
She was the most powerful Electromaster.
The strict firewalls and authentication would be entirely useless. Tokiwadai’s Ace could
directly manipulate the electricity, so it was possible she could rewrite a portion of the
system and equip the weapon as her own.
Yes, rewrite it.
That would mean erasing a trace of that golden retriever.
Kihara Yuiitsu’s revenge should have been top priority for her, but that possibility briefly
erased all other thoughts from her mind.
Her unique brand of romance whispered to her that there was something else to be done.
“…Don’t touch that.”
This had nothing to do with the frightening specs of the Anti-Art Attachment.
Her thinking did not even get that far.
“Get your dirty hands off what Sensei left
behiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiind!!”
Part 14[edit]
For Kamijou and Salome, this was their first and last chance.
“She’s looking away… We’ve gotta make a surprise attack now!! To be honest, I don’t
know what this St. Germain and Shoggoth stuff is about, but that shouldn’t change the
fact that, unlike me, she’s still a normal human behind all that. So slipping past that
bizarre stuff and getting an attack in on her physical body should silence her!!”
“And how exactly am I going to do that? I don’t know any convenient techniques to
knock out a girl with a tap to the neck or punch to the gut!”
“I have a bit of an idea. So c’mon, chase after that Kihara Yuiitsu woman. There’s
nothing you can do if you don’t get close!”
He heard the sound of fluttering cloth from overhead.
It was Yuiitsu.
She had been clinging to the building wall until now, but she had spread out the
amorphous Sample Shoggoth like a paraglider to soar through the night sky. Kamijou had
no idea how she had tamed either St. Germain or the Shoggoth. In fact, he could not
understand how anyone could let those things into their body even if they were safe.
“Is she headed straight for that warehouse!? We’ve only got my two legs, so there’s no
way we can catch up!”
“No, that’s fine. Just run along the surface and keep her in sight. I’ll make sure this
works.”
“?”
“Ahh, ahh. I’ve fought so many people I don’t remember who I told what. Kamijou-chan,
did I tell you about the exact conditions needed to activate my External Offering?”
Salome grinned with her arms around his shoulders like a strange TV personality’s
cardigan.
“My External Offering is Celtic sacrifice magic, you see. Any weapon I destroy is offered
up to my god and I gain its effects and traits. But if I don’t keep the chain going within
three minutes, it all resets to zero. The growing snowball will fall apart.”
“And? How long has it been since we were in the schoolyard? Your chain or whatever
has to have broken by now, so you’ve lost the effect of the Kamisato Faction’s self-
sacrifice.”
“Who ever said that?”
She whispered in his ear and he felt an ominous chill, even though Salome was supposed
to be an ally (for the time being).
The mass murderer ignored that and continued.
“Hey, Kamijou-chan. A mass murderer like me needs to make sure her weapon is nice
and sharp, don’tcha think? I like to keep my snowball intact as long as I can, so I need to
keep my chain going no matter what it takes.”
“…?”
“Even the most pitifully weak weapon will preserve the chain. And conveniently, when
I’m holding onto you from behind, this hood sticking out from inside your uniform – is it
from a hoodie? – creates a nice big bag that no one else can see inside.”
“Wait. Don’t tell me…”
“And…have – you – forgotten? My entire body is artificial. That means I’m a weapon
myself. I certainly didn’t expect for that Yuiitsu person to tear me to pieces, but that just
means I need to use that to my advantage, don’tcha think? By gathering the artificial
organs that were still usable and stuffing them in your hood, I have a decent stock to keep
my chain going. Each time the chain is about to run out, I bite into one to destroy it and
offer it up to my god. That way I can maintain my destructive power.”
He was no longer even sweating.
Goose bumps covered his entire body.
Even if they were artificial, these were still the “contents” that kept a human body
moving. These were the toes, tendons, cartilage, and entrails of her lower body. And
Mass Murderer Salome was continually biting into her own “contents” to destroy them.
He felt a floating sensation on the nape of his neck. It no longer felt like his own body.
This was a member of the Kamisato Faction.
It was Kamisato Kakeru’s little sister.
Was that why she had this many screws loose?
“But this time, it really is a one-time thing.”
Salome sounded like she was planning a surprise birthday party.
Kamijou heard a small hard sound behind him. It was possible the raincoat girl had
lightly bit the pocket watch instead of kissing it.
That was a sign of her resolve.
“I’ll leave the final blow to you, Kamijou-chan!!”
The mass murderer’s right arm mercilessly tore through empty air.
Salome had destroyed, absorbed, and offered up a great variety weapons to thoroughly
increase her own destructive power, so a few dozen meters of distance was nothing to her.
An invisible attack shot toward Kihara Yuiitsu who flew through the night sky.
The large wings supporting her like a hang glider were torn apart and she lost her lift.
Gravity seemed to grab her with almost unnatural intensity and she began to drop.
If Kamijou ran, he could reach her now.
“…”
Kihara Yuiitsu sent the amorphous Sample Shoggoth below her as a cushion to absorb
the shock of landing, but that meant she could not move until that was complete.
Kamijou Touma reached her.
He first sent his right fist toward the Sample Shoggoth at her feet rather than her herself.
The amorphous mass was blown away and Yuiitsu slammed into the ground with her
cushion gone.
Still, she did not break.
Kamijou Touma and Kihara Yuiitsu’s gazes clashed.
And…
This time, they both sent out attacks.
Kamijou made a scooping uppercut.
Yuiitsu let a torrent of Sample Shoggoth erupt from her right wrist.
Both attacks hit, but that meant neither one was a clean hit. Kamijou’s right fist caught
Yuiitsu’s jaw and Yuiitsu’s torrent swept Kamijou away.
“Ghh!!”
“Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!”
They both rolled back as if an explosion had occurred between them. Kamijou could not
let this continue much longer. Especially when Kihara Yuiitsu seemed to be targeting
Mikoto more than him.
But when he tried to place his right hand on the ground and get up, intense pain shot
through his shoulder.
It was Sample Shoggoth.
It had changed form to gain fangs which had dug into his shoulder near the collarbone.
“Gah…kh…ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!”
He yelled, but it was no use.
His right hand had grown limp.
Meanwhile, Kihara Yuiitsu was trying to get up. What would she use next? Sample
Shoggoth’s torrent, St. Germain’s magic, or Kamisato’s World Rejecter? Any one of
them would defeat him now. He could still use his left hand, so he slid it along the ground
and felt something hard.
He grabbed it.
Only after picking it up did he realize what it was.
(The UL Exploder!?)
It was the handgun-like device belonging to Kihara Yuiitsu. However, it looked more like
an athletics festival starting pistol than a military weapon and it did not actually fire
bullets. He did not know how it worked, but it caused an explosion in the empty space it
was aimed at.
He held it up with his left hand and placed his finger on the trigger.
He gasped for breath and unsteadily aimed it.
If he fired like crazy, he might just defeat her. Kihara Yuiitsu had a bizarre collection
with the St. Germain virus, Sample Shoggoth, and Kamisato’s right hand, but she still
had a human body below it all, unlike Mass Murderer Salome. While a bullet attacked at
a single point, this explosive blast attacked an entire surface and was thus much more
difficult to defend against. That might allow him to damage her human body.
This would allow him to stop her.
This would allow him to rescues Misaka Mikoto, who seemed to be Yuiitsu’s top priority
for some unknown reason, and Kamisato Kakeru, whose hand had already been stolen.
That meant this was not wrong.
He would be right to do this.
Kamijou Touma clenched his teeth as he told himself that.
But…
For some reason, he heard the voice of someone who was not even here.
“Give up on that idea. Would you be able to save more people if you trained in martial
arts? Would you be able to resolve things more smartly if you had a gun or a knife? That
would have the exact opposite effect. The more means of killing you have and the farther
you move from the path that saves your opponent using their own power, the weaker you
will become.”
He had been told that when he had been unsure what path to take.
His Understander had told him that.
“Martial arts, a gun, a knife, or any other obvious offensive power would only increase
your ability to ‘cut people off’.”
This may not have been something to remember now.
The ideal and reality were two different things. It may have been fine for him to make
that distinction and pull the trigger.
“Your greatest weapon is the powerful arm that reached into the abyss and saved even
someone as hopelessly evil and rotten to the core as Magic God Othinus. That ability to
connect is your ultimate trump card.”
But was that really okay?
After being saved by those words, could he really sully them like this?
“What is wanted from you is not violence on the same level as World Rejecter. It isn’t the
power to kill. It is the power of human reason that can envelop that violence.”
He hesitated.
He thought.
He clenched his teeth.
And that delayed him too much.
“Gah!!!???”
He groaned from intense pain.
Both Kihara Yuiitsu’s arms had become amorphous torrents. They swept down from
above onto the boy’s shoulders. They smashed Mass Murderer Salome’s arms as she
clung to his back and they mercilessly tried to dislocate his shoulders.
His left hand went limp and the UL Exploder slipped from his grasp.
He had lost his chance.
“This kind of power…”
He knew that, but he still spoke.
Or perhaps this was the ultimate counterpunch against this woman who was justifying her
violence with her crazed obsession with revenge.
“…isn’t what I wanted.”
Death rushed toward him.
The woman in a cheap suit and a tattered lab coat approached him. She grabbed his
cheeks between her hands.
He heard an extremely sticky sound in both ears.
“I don’t feel like messing with you anymore, so I’ll use a much more certain method.”
“Ah…gah…!!”
“Now, it’s time for romance. How would you like to die? Everyone must have had that
truly worthless discussion at some point or another. So how would you like to have your
body eaten away? Do you want your fat slowly melted away from the outside by Sample
Shoggoth?”
Her lips parted right in front of his face.
Something round sat on top of her seductively wet tongue.
What had originally been a black pill was now a bright red piece of candy.
“Or do you want your brain infected from within by the St. Germain virus? It may have
been attenuated, but it can’t be a fun way to go if you don’t have any resistance to it.”
Part 15[edit]
Meanwhile, Misaka Mikoto could not have understood even half of what was going on.
She had not been directly involved in the incidents the St. Germain virus and Sample
Shoggoth had come from, so it was hard for her to understand just how frightening they
were.
But she could intuitively tell.
She had shaken off the ominous temptation of the Anti-Art Attachment and started to
leave the non-functioning cold storage warehouse through the staff entrance, but then she
saw it.
She saw Kihara Yuiitsu holding that battered boy’s jaw and attempting to feed him
“something” in the form of red candy directly from her mouth.
She was going to “infect” him with her hands or with her mouth.
That would be irreversible.
It was just like damaged cancer cells affecting the healthy cells around them. Once that
entered him, it would remake the structure of his body and decisively destroy that boy
who had approached her like normal so recently.
“No…”
She had to stop this.
She had to stop it immediately.
But there was nothing she could do. Kamijou Touma had far surpassed the stage she
stood on, so even her signature Railgun would be easily deflected. She had learned that
all too well against that High Priest guy. But she could not just sit here stricken with a
sense of helplessness.
No matter what.
By any means necessary.
Even if it meant violating a taboo.
She needed to utterly, decisively, and immediately end this with a single attack.
Otherwise she would lose that boy forever.
“I can’t let that
happeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeennnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn
nnnnnnn!!”
Frightfully powerful electromagnetic waves spread out from that girl.
The many possessions of the dead inside that cold storage warehouse had supposedly
fallen into an eternal slumber, but she summoned them back to the world of the living.
Those weapons had formed an evil plesiosaur, but that silhouette crumbled. They
gathered around the girl like a ferocious tornado. They broke apart, lost their great
meaning, and transferred away from their original owner as they changed their design to
better match the young girl. Countless weapons attached to the armor on her limbs and
the joint on her back. A supporting leg situated itself behind her so she would not be
crushed by their weight. It was all bizarrely shaped, yet it all fit her perfectly.
There was a giant missile container, an excitation rod for a laser beam, a liquid weapon
turret that included sprayers for a flamethrower, liquid nitrogen, and powerful acid, a
giant drill meant to break into shelters, a Gatling gun, a rapid-fire cannon, and – as a
finishing touch – the weapon from which her signature Railgun took its name.
Meanwhile, a woman had much more than a nosebleed. Her entire body had been torn
apart and she lay in a pool of blood.
It was Kihara Yuiitsu.
But even that was not fatal.
Something crawled all over her body. It was Sample Shoggoth. Just as it had forcibly
sewn on Kamisato Kakeru’s hand, it sewed together the laceration all over her body.
She had lost quite a bit of blood, but she could get a blood transfusion or, if she could not
get one in time, use an IV of boiled saline to at least avoid too large a drop in blood
pressure. In her current state, she would be lucky just to avoid going into shock from
blood loss.
“Heh…heh.”
She leaned against a wind turbine and laughed despite her extreme injuries.
She raised her right hand toward the moon, clenched it, and opened it again.
She could still move it.
Kamisato Kakeru’s World Rejecter had not left her.
“I managed to create an outline with Sample Shoggoth and copied their magic using the
attenuated St. Germain virus.”
A rusty-smelling liquid spilled from the corner of her mouth as she smiled.
She continued to smile.
“But that is not the true value of this right hand. Those who were satisfied after revealing
the closer-to-home trick must have been relieved in their conclusion that there was
nothing further inside.”
That also applied to the one who had likely been watching that battle.
That is, the “human” who had been using his Underline to look down at them from his
point of safety.
Board Chairman Aleister.
(It’s true Kamisato Kakeru was my first target as revenge for taking Sensei from me. And
it sounded like to fun to take everyone from him, including that Kamijou Touma he found
so important.)
With a mental “but”, she switched from thought to speech.
“Aleister. Now that I think about it, you were the original cause. If you hadn’t given
Sensei that role, sent him to his death, and had him face that bizarre opponent known as
Kamisato Kakeru, none of this tragedy would have occurred.”
She slowly lowered her right hand.
She held it straight forward instead of toward the moon.
There was a windowless building there.
Kihara Yuiitsu thought about the possibilities of World Rejecter’s power in the right hand
stolen from Kamisato Kakeru. A dark smile came to her lips. That Board Chairman liked
to act all-knowing and all-powerful, but if he really knew everything, then he would have
known what would happen to the golden retriever. He had known, yet he had still sent
him off as a disposable pawn for some “plan” that Yuiitsu was not sure even existed.
What would Kihara Noukan have said?
Between good and evil it’s evil, and between like and dislike it’s like.
But Yuiitsu was different.
Choosing a different path was interesting.
She felt a definite sufficiency there.
“Hey, Aleister.”
She spoke softly, as if singing a lullaby.
Yet her icy voice contained great resolve, as if she planned to set fire to the house once
the child fell asleep.
That vengeful demon spoke while drowning in her own unique brand of romance.
“How many plans have you had to abandon before this one?”
Slight strength entered her raised right hand.
She prepared to activate its power.
But just before she did, a new footstep sounded from within twenty centimeters of her.
“…!!!???”
Even as injured as she was, it was unnatural for her to miss someone approaching so
close. And she did not have time for a detailed examination of the situation. She started
moving her hand away from the Windowless Building and toward the noise.
But before she could, someone grabbed her wrist.
Their other hand grabbed her throat and lifted her up.
She was forced to her feet and her back was slammed against the wind turbine.
“Kah…ah…!”
She gasped as a face appeared just five centimeters from her own.
It was Board Chairman Aleister.
That “human” looked like both a man and a woman, like both an adult and a child, and
like both a saint and a sinner. His emotionless eyes peered deep into the out-of-control
factor that was Kihara Yuiitsu.
And then he spoke.
“If you wish to kill me, then feel free to try. As long as you achieve your objective, you
may take whatever detour you wish. If that is your desire, I will take you on at any time.”
This vengeance-seeker respected that golden retriever from the bottom of her heart.
But behind that she hid intense emotion that made that identity appear shallow.
“But complete your job first. Anything else would be far too cruel to ‘that man’ who lost
his life to push you to action.”
His words did not even try to hide the fact that he was behind it all.
“Heh.”
Kihara Yuiitsu laughed.
Her laughter was out of control even as she had a hand around her throat.
“Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha!! Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!! Hee
hee!! Gya ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!”
The “human” with long silver hair and a surgical gown let go of Yuiitsu and spoke
quietly.
“There is no turning back for me now, so I might as well stop hiding in my safe zone.”
“Yes, yes! Use me as much as you want!! But I will never forgive anyone who harmed
Sensei. Kamisato Kakeru, his hangers-on, the Magic Gods who made him special, that
Kamijou boy he thought was so important, you as the creator of this cruel city, and all the
many people who turn the gears of this cruel city as they enjoy their lives!! Every last one
of you built the rails that sent Sensei into the abyss. Between good and evil you’re all
good, and between like and dislike you’re all dislike!! As long as I can eradicate you all
to my heart’s content, nothing else matters!! Yes, I mean it! This is my own romance that
Sensei could never hope to copy!!”
“…”
“So what will you have me do, main dish?”
Yuiitsu laughed after falling back to the ground.
The Board Chairman answered with a blank expression, but that did not mean he lacked
emotions.
“Kamisato Kakeru was the original threat and Misaka Mikoto has introduced a new threat
by contacting the Anti-Art Attachment. She was never anything more than one of the
pieces needed to build the network for Dragon, so it was the clones that mattered, not her.
If she will obstruct the plan as a whole, then she must be eliminated.”
“But given the state of the game board, you don’t have time to have me crush them one at
a time, do you?”
Aleister slowly exhaled and answered.
“Choose one. I will deal with the other.”
“In that case, they’re both done for,” muttered bloody Kihara Yuiitsu.
The Board Chairman narrowed his eyes a little and then looked up at the night sky.
And as he looked up, he spoke.
“What do you think you’re looking at, you bitch? Do you want me to curse you to death
right this instant?”
“Hm.”
Lola Stuart spoke to herself on the other side of the globe.
“That confirms it.”
Afterword[edit]
If you’ve been reading the volumes one at a time, welcome back. If you had the courage
to buy them all at once, welcome.
This is Kazuma Kamachi.
New Testament is already at Volume 15! As I mentioned in Volume 14’s afterword, I
think this was another volume of Kamisato Kakeru and those around him destroying the
“sanctuaries” that had settled into place in this series. I think I placed most of the main
characters in a position where they couldn’t maintain the usual look on their face. The
only exceptions are the girls of the Kamisato Faction who (should have) looked most
suspect at first glance.
The Kamisato Faction first appeared in Volume 14, so they are quite shallow and I expect
a lot of readers thought they were mostly just a symbol. But what they’re doing isn’t that
much different what the people on Kamijou’s side do. My experiment for Volumes 14
and 15 was to see how different a character looks if you’ve seen them gradually built up
as a protagonist or if you haven’t.
So now that you’ve seen Kamisato Kakeru’s character over the course of two volumes,
your impression of his environment may have changed. But as the writer, I didn’t do
anything special. The main point is that he “looks” different just by having his character
built up like that. …In other words, this is something that can influence people’s
impression of a series as a whole, yet it’s something the writer can’t do intentionally. By
building things up, the characters become more appealing and you can dig deeper into the
world building. All of that is great, but it also works against you when you’ve built up
certain expectations and have “sanctuaries” you can’t move even if you want to. They all
start piling up like a falling block puzzle game. This has strengthened my desire to work
toward opening up some breathing room in that sense.
This story was set in Academy City and involved a variety of technology, but the overall
theme was more related to magic. To be more specific, I took my material from the
concept of “sacrifice”. It was touched on in the novel, but people often have a grim view
of sacrifices since the idea of living sacrifices has become so prominent. But since we
have to specify “living” sacrifices, there are of course non-living sacrifices. I focused
more on those.
The most obvious one was Salome, the naked raincoat girl(!?), but I also added in some
other characters, gimmicks, and situations that included the symbolism of sacrifice.
Combine that with my focus on destroying “sanctuaries”, and this volume may have had
an overall ominous atmosphere or unstable image.
For the Kamisato Faction, I tried to use a naming system I hadn’t used in the series before,
but…hm. I think I may have gone a little overboard there. Yet when I look in baby name
dictionaries, I find them recommending even crazier names as if it’s normal. Is this what
they call the flow of time? I try to give my protagonists relatively easy to read names
since their names appear the most often, but I’ve started worrying over what qualifies as
“easy to read” with some of these modern names I’m seeing.
I give my thanks to my illustrator Haimura-san and to my editors Miki-san, Onodera-san,
and Anan-san. This threw in a ton of characters instead of focusing on a single point, so it
must have been hard to adjust for that. Thank you very much for sticking with me.
Also, Kasai Shin-san designed the A.A.A. Mikoto Version. He has helped here and there
with mecha-related stuff. I get the feeling that none of the illustrators that work with me
are your average person, and he is no exception. Anyway, thank you very much!
I also give my thanks to the readers. This story involved drawing on a bunch of past
characters and parts of the setting, so it might have been harder to read through than
normal. I was trying to create something enjoyable by having everything build up in a
positive direction even as the sanctuaries were destroyed. I leave it to you to judge how I
did. Thank you yet again.
It is time to close the pages for now while praying that the pages of the next book will be
opened.
And I lay my pen down for now.